Index

Index

Of all Whitefield's friendships, two stand out: those with Howell Harris and Benjamin Franklin. Harris introduced Whitefield to the fields, taught him how to be brave in the pulpit, and later found him a wife. Franklin introduced Whitefield to the American press and later served as his Pennsylvania agent for orphan-house funds. Harris was an austere methodist of such moral stature that he gave the woman who loved him to Whitefield rather than be tempted by her affection. Franklin was a resigned humanist whose dalliances with women he fully revealed in his memoirs. It is ironic, then, that Whitefield's friendship with Harris was eventually strained over Harris's indiscretions with a woman, while his friendship with Franklin grew stronger with every passing year. In the end, Franklin became Whitefield's best American friend and, reciprocally, Whitefield was Franklin's only evangelical friend.

Unlike many public figures, Whitefield avoided to a remarkable degree the temptations peculiar to his calling - greed, denomination-founding, and womanizing. His fortitude was simply underscored by the news that Harris had taken up with a female admirer. At the time of the scandal, Harris was married to a young convert named Anne Williams. While preaching in North Wales in 1748, Harris met another methodist convert, Sidney Griffith, the wife of a ne'er-do-well Welsh squire. Griffith soon became strongly attracted to the aggressive "Hammer and Axe" Harris. Before long she was sharing with him divine "revelations," which she believed would enhance his ministry. Harris, himself recovering from a bad head wound inflicted by a mob, accepted her inspiration, and the two became collaborators. Soon Griffith deserted her husband and, with Anne Harris's consent, moved into the Harris home. The relationship between preacher and convert grew warmer. With "Madam Griffith's" encouragement, Harris moved in ever more charismatic directions, believing that her inspiration would "rise me with the great" saints of the church.

So dependent did Harris become on Griffith that the two began traveling together. This Whitefield could not tolerate. Such behavior called the entire methodist enterprise into question. Already critics hinted that the ultimate outcome of charismatic, passion-based ministries was, as with the stage, sexual indiscretion. Now Harris was providing fuel for such accusations. Whitefield had no choice but to distance himself from his friend, however painful it might be. In August 1751, Whitefield refused to open the Tabernacle pulpit to Harris unless he repented. But only in 1752, when Griffith died, did a repentant Harris return to the methodist fold. It was too late. The oncedear friendship with Whitefield had sustained a numbing blow from which it never revived.

Franklin was a different story. His sexual indiscretions were well known, but they were of no real consequence to the methodist cause and had no potential to compromise Whitefield's ministry. Indeed, Franklin's youthful charm and easy access to female company may even have won a secret admiration in the shyer, more repressed Whitefield. Surely here, as in many other places, each man must have seen in the other an appealing road not taken. In addition, Franklin would have seen in Whitefield a cleric whose Christianity and sense of charity were bigger than his denomination. And Whitefield would have viewed Franklin as a virtuous public man whose dedication to public works and charity had few Christian equals. Such was their mutual affection that Franklin forever encouraged Whitefield to look after the state of his badly deteriorating health, while Whitefield continually encouraged Franklin to look after the state of his badly deteriorating soul. Through their solicitations both earthly and heavenly, they displayed the deep concern they had for each other.

Throughout the period of Whitefield's disillusionment with Harris, his friendship with Franklin continued to grow. Already by the summer of 1752, over a decade of steady communication and mutual concern had accumulated between them. When not in America, the two had kept up a steady correspondence, partly over publishing business, but more often simply to share events in one another's lives. When in 1752 Franklin's pathbreaking experiments with electricity came to Whitefield's attention, they prompted a warm letter apprising Franklin that in England "you grow more and more famous in the learned." By the time Franklin retired from the printing business, this unlikely friendship had grown even stronger. In fact, Whitefield celebrated Franklin wherever he traveled, while Franklin memorialized Whitefield in his Autobiography.

On the face of it, there could have been no more unusual a combination for friendship than the creed-despising Franklin and the deist-despising Whitefield. Each was on public record as opposing much of the philosophy the other stood for. Yet on further reflection, there appear deeper similarities and affinities that make their friendship intelligible.

To begin with, both had an uncommonly direct and perceptive understanding of the transitional age in which they lived. A seventeenth-century Whitefield or Franklin would have been inconceivable. With no postal service (Franklin's invention), no newspapers, urban market centers, regular transatlantic travel, or religious toleration, the kind of entrepreneurial creativity evidenced by Franklin and Whitefield could not have existed. The old monarchical, aristocratic, and coercive social order was changing in ever more individualistic and voluntaristic ways. From their respective sides of the ocean, and in their respective careers, Whitefield and Franklin had developed a transatlantic sense of, and an instinct for, the new markets that were reshaping their world - and both had discovered how to exploit these new forces.

In particular, both exhibited a precocious appreciation for the art of promotion and the consequent power of popularity. Whether through personal charisma in the case of Whitefield or through the power of the press in the case of Franklin, both knew how to exploit the temper of their times. They capitalized on the departure from traditional associations that was moving their worlds toward new networks premised on voluntary association and self-interest. In voluntary methodist "societies" and in political "juntos," engines of enormous power were created capable of challenging - and defeating - entrenched authority in church and state.

Franklin's effective use of the newspaper in Pennsylvania politics was a model for Whitefield in his pioneering work with religious magazines and letters to the press. Besides being Whitefield's most reliable American printer, Franklin taught Whitefield the power of the popular news sheets. All the learned pamphlets in the world could be arrayed against Whitefield, but if he dominated the popular press, he could overcome all obstacles.

In like manner, Whitefield taught Franklin invaluable lessons in the art of self-promotion. Whitefield's journals were, as we have seen, notable both for their shameless egocentricity and for the creation of a persona deliberately crafted for public dissemination and image. Franklin, in his own way, imitated this in his memoirs, leaving historians a deliberately constructed persona that forever hides the man behind the pose.

The memoirs of both tell the story of self-made men who through sheer determination tapped the new forces reshaping their society. In the process, both offer didactic warnings against "cheap grace" that seeks to circumvent unceasing labor in the cause. For Whitefield, the moment of truth had come as the Oxford servitor faced his inability to win divine favor or social status. For Franklin the moment had come when Gov. Thomas Penn proved an unreliable benefactor, forcing a young Ben to go to work to pay off his debt. Through carefully selected personal examples and personality sketches, each of the memoirs creates a popular persona in a highly dramatic manner accompanied by engaging dialogue. Both the forlorn Oxford servitor and Poor Richard adopt colorful styles and autobiographical lessons designed to teach people - particularly young people - the way to happiness, whether temporal (Franklin) or eternal (Whitefield).

In their married lives as well, the two evidenced remarkable, though in this case regrettable, similarities. Both displayed decreasing rather than increasing care for their wives. As Whitefield was frequently absent from home in preaching, so Franklin was separated for years from Deborah, with little show of regret. Franklin's letters to Deborah were perfunctory and mostly matters of bookkeeping and enjoinders to thrift. And both husbands seemed almost embarrassed to be seen with their wives. However different their reasons, and however different their responses to women generally, both suffered an emptiness in their private lives that they filled with unceasing public service. More important than shared market instincts or obsessions with public service, however, were the warm feelings that Franklin and Whitefield shared for one another. Indeed, these feelings found expression in no other context - feelings of loyalty, concern, and well-meaning that did not depend on ideological connection or obligation but grew out of sheer affection. The inner selves both hid so well from the public were the caring selves they unveiled to one another in moments of intuitive recognition. With each other, Whitefield the actor-preacher and Franklin the literary persona became real people living out the moral codes they proclaimed.

Ironically, the unshakable loyalties that Franklin and Whitefield shared stood in sharp contrast to the betrayals both experienced in their professional associations. For all his methodist proclamations, Whitefield came to feel betrayed by the defections of many of his closest methodist affiliates, including John Wesley, James Hutton, John Cennick, John Syms, Elizabeth Delamotte, and Howell Harris. Left with uncertain religious allies and a superficial marriage, Whitefield may well have valued his friendship with Franklin as highly - if not more highly - than he did his shared faith with methodist co-laborers. In like manner, many of Franklin's closest political and business associations and alliances soured as his reputation rose and fell on both sides of the Atlantic. On more than one occasion, Whitefield lent his pen to restore Franklin's credibility.

Contained in the friendship of Whitefield and Franklin is a testimony to the power of a changing, increasingly mobile and impersonal world to mold relationships. These men lived in a public world to a far greater extent than most of their contemporaries, and both were uniquely placed to base friendship on feeling rather than traditional bonds of family, neighborhood, or shared ideologies. Neither the church nor the local community constituted the center of Whitefield's or Franklin's peripatetic worlds. Both men, in fact, were most at ease in transit, and they invariably recorded their greatest pleasures far from home. In a sense, both had to establish friendships outside of traditional boundaries: traditional friendships were out of the question. So they injected great emotional energy instead into their transitory friendships. Although personal contacts between Whitefield and Franklin were few and far between, their emotional bond remained strong, finding sustenance in their correspondence as well as their ongoing efforts to do favors for each other.

For both Franklin and Whitefield, the antithesis of per sonal trust and voluntary commitment was institutional fiat. Neither could serve two masters. In their experience-driven worlds, hierarchical institutions could not be trusted. At the same time, new personal associations forged in voluntary settings had become natural. Franklin's bitterness toward entrenched political interests is well known. Equally evident was his hostility to all religious denominations. Instead of promoting gospel works of charity, he believed, denominations existed for their own sake and actually worked at cross purposes to the universal gospel they proclaimed. Hierarchical and aristocratic denominations (particularly Anglicans and Presbyterians), Franklin complained, "serv'd principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another." His use of the term unfriendly is significant. He considered friendships forged in coercive institutions to be suspicious and illegitimate; often as not they rested on artificial foundations bereft of personal experience and so tended "to lessen the good Opinion another might have of his own Religion."

Franklin's personal response to denominational factionalism was to cease attending church altogether, reserving Sundays as a day of private prayer and study. Franklin hardly ever went to church, and when he did, he invariably left with a feeling that the true gospel had been left outside. A visit to Philadelphia's Presbyterian church convinced him that the minister, Jedediah Andrews, knew nothing of truly disinterested moral works: "his Discourses were chiefly either polemic Arguments, or Explications of the peculiar Doctrines of our Sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral Principle was inculcated or enforc'd, their Aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good Citizens."

Whitefield agreed, except that he would have substituted "good Christians" for "good Citizens." But instead of avoiding religious affiliation, he sought to transcend it. Like Franklin, Whitefield saw in religious denominations an ossification and perversion of the spontaneous religion recorded in the gospel accounts he re-enacted. Churchmen of all denominations were more concerned with perpetuating their institutional trusts than with furthering the evangelical and charitable imperatives of the gospel. In his own way, Whitefield too balked at the petty institutional rivalries of denominations. In so doing, he became, with Franklin, a voice speaking out against traditional institutions and looking toward more spontaneous, popular bases of association that would free individuals from the shackles of privilege and hierarchical interest.

Besides sharing an antipathy toward traditional institutions, both men placed a premium on voluntary charity rather than institutional tithes. Almost alone among eighteenthcentury churchmen, Whitefield consistently fused his gospel message with unceasing nondenominational plans of charity and good works. The orphan house and Pennsylvania school for blacks were merely the most conspicuous extrainstitutional religious agencies he promoted. He frequently took up offerings for local charities throughout Britain and in Germany for schools and orphan houses and for public relief, and he dug deeply into his own pocket when he did. At the same time, he refused to contribute moneys to his own Anglican church.

As Franklin saw Whitefield in a peculiarly humanitarian light, so Whitefield encountered a more religious Franklin than most saw. In fact, Franklin's religious cavils were directed less at religion per se than at religious institutions. Underneath his objections was a passionate religious seeker. In conversations and correspondence with Whitefield, he confessed a deepseated religious consciousness that affirmed his belief in a personal God and an eternal afterlife of rewards and punishments. Though unwilling to speculate on the divinity of Christ, Franklin confessed in his Autobiography,

I never was without some religious Principles; I never doubted, for instance, the Existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and govern'd it by his Providence; that the most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to Man; that our Souls are immortal; and that all Crime will be punished and Virtue rewarded either here or hereafter; these I esteem'd the Essentials of every Religion, and being to be found in all the Religions we had in our Country I respected them all, tho' with different degrees of Respect as I found them more or less mix'd with other Articles which without any Tendency to inspire, promote or confirm Morality, serv'd principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

The inner consistencies and unities shared by Franklin and Whitefield are also revealed in their correspondence. In letters and conversation, religion was often discussed. Franklin allowed himself to be drawn out on the subject of personal religiosity with Whitefield as with no one else, finding in Whitefield a listener he could trust - if not agree with. Ever the evangelist, Whitefield followed up his praise for Franklin's electrical experiments with a customary entreaty: "As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity, I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new birth." Such sentiments were vintage Whitefield, yet his tone was one of sympathy and the mutual understanding of friends. He always presented his advice to Franklin in the context of concern rather than controversy. Aware that his own views were perfectly understood by Franklin, he could close with a good-natured "what do you expect?" from a revivalist: "you will excuse this freedom. I must have aliquid Christi [something of Christ] in all my letters." This was the integrity that Franklin had come to expect.

And Whitefield knew what to expect from Franklin. When Whitefield told Franklin he had no place to stay on an early visit to Philadelphia, Franklin replied, "You know my House, if you can make shift with its scanty Accomodations you will be most heartily welcome. He replied, that if I made that kind Offer for Christ's sake, I should not miss of a Reward, - And I return'd, Don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ's sake, but for your sake."

The religious Franklin that emerged in his correspon dence with Whitefield bore little resemblance to the scoffer at religious hypocrisy and institutionalized religion that appeared in his public pose. To Whitefield he revealed a deeply reflective religious consciousness struggling to come to grips with the contradictions between gospel morality and the immorality of Christians. Franklin's ethical emblem, no less than Whitefield's, was Christ, but a Christ known chiefly through his ethical concerns and actions rather than his divinity and saving atonement. In one letter to Whitefield, Franklin noted that, unlike many churchmen, Christ "thought much less of those outward appearances and professions.... He professed that he came not to call the righteous - but sinners to repentance, which implied his modest opinion that there were some in his time who thought themselves so good, that they need not hear even him for improvement." So too, in Franklin's experience, there were too many who talked the New Birth but lived the old lies: "I wish it was more productive of good works -works of kindness, charity, mercy and public spirit, not holy day keeping, sermon reading - or making long prayers - full of flatteries and compliments."

In another letter, Franklin sought to further clarify his religious faith. At base, it was profoundly ethical and selfdeprecating: "You will see by my notion of good works, that I am far from expecting to Merit Heaven by them," Franklin explained. By "heaven, we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and eternal in duration." Of this blissful state, Franklin confessed, "I can do nothing to deserve such rewards."

In fact, Franklin thought much about heaven, and in another letter confessed that "that Being who gave me existence, and thro' almost threescore Years has been Continually showering his Favours upon me, whose very Chastisements have been Blessings to me, can I doubt that he loves me? And if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me not only here but hereafter?" Franklin's destination, like Whitefield's, was heaven. And in both cases, they understood the agency to be an unmerited divine invitation that was pro foundly unimpressed with the various cheap graces of this world. To Franklin and Whitefield - outwardly proud, assertive achievers - humility may well have been their greatest strength. Franklin expressed it passionately in a letter to Whitefield when he confessed, "we are all of a family. For my own Part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look upon myself as conferring favors but paying debts.... I can only shew my gratitude for those mercies from God by readiness to help his other children and my brethren."

In Whitefield, Franklin saw someone who was different from other churchmen. Beneath Whitefield's bombast and showmanship, Franklin saw a truly virtuous character who did not hesitate to throw in his lot with slaves, women, Indians, and orphans - those eighteenth-century lepers ignored by most clerics.

Yet there was also something Franklin found disturbing in Whitefield's humility, for at the heart of Whitefield's actions was the experience of the New Birth - an experience Franklin never felt. This experiential void became the source of religious crisis. If Franklin was deeply religious, it was ultimately a somber religion, lacking the comforts of Whitefield's evangelical piety. Franklin hoped, but could never believe, in an actively involved, caring deity. The Incarnation was, for him, a matter of speculation that he chose to reject. With no Incarnation, there was no embodied assurance of a caring, involved God. In a later letter to Whitefield, written in the midst of brewing colonial tensions, he confessed,

I see with you that our affairs are not well managed by our rulers here below. I wish I could believe with you, that they are well attended to by those above. I rather suspect, from certain circumstances, that though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence, as either may happen to be uppermost. It is, however, an uncomfortable thought, and I leave it.

To this, Whitefield scrawled across the bottom: "Uncomfortable indeed! and, blessed be God, unscriptural."

Here we see the greatest difference separating the religious worlds of Franklin and Whitefield. For Franklin, the experience of personal friendship could not be translated into an experience of personal faith. The result was profound pessimism. Ironically, Franklin's personal religion was more serious and filled with a sense of ultimate depravity than Whitefield's Calvinistic - but ultimately optimistic - methodism. Franklin, the outwardly jovial humorist, and Whitefield, the outwardly stern Calvinist, were at heart opposites. In all his activities, Whitefield was forever buoyed by the hope of a caring God, while the unceasingly active Franklin felt forever tortured by the fear that no one took note of his petty "little affairs." Whitefield built a revival confident that the drama in which he played at center stage was a divine one. Franklin built a nation plagued by the fear that no one ultimately cared.

Whenever Whitefield traveled to Philadelphia he was a guest in the Franklin home, and he won the affection of the whole family. He routinely inquired into the affairs of Franklin's children. And Franklin evidenced a reciprocal concern with Whitefield's shaky health and troubled finances. As orphan-house debts mounted, Franklin even contrived schemes to raise money by public subscription and donated £75 from his own pocket.

But the most remarkable gesture of friendship and trust between Franklin and Whitefield appeared in a letter written by Franklin in July 1756. At that time Whitefield was in England while in America the colonists were absorbing one devastating defeat after another at the hands of the French. The future of the Anglo-American hinterland seemed in question. In this troubled atmosphere, Franklin wrote Whitefield with a remarkable proposition. He began by musing about their lives and about the possibility of finishing them with something big. In terms certain to arouse Whitefield's interest, he observed that "life like a dramatic piece, should not be conducted with reg ularity, but, methinks, it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with." Each had accomplished great things in his life. Perhaps, the time had arrived to do something together that would bring the best of both of their worlds together in a united effort. Why not, Franklin continued, "settle a colony in Ohio?"

Franklin undoubtedly recognized that such a request to Whitefield came out of the blue, so he immediately followed with some practical considerations. The colony would serve both as a frontier buffer between France and the seaboard and as a model of virtue and piety. The implication here was that Franklin would take care of the virtue, and Whitefield would handle the piety. Ever the entrepreneur, Franklin envisioned a planned settlement like the colonies of old that would be both prosperous for the colonists and beneficial to the Indians: "Might it not greatly facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen, if we could, by such a colony, shew them a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian traders?" With the two of them working together, the experiment in virtue and piety could not fail. Surely God would bless their endeavor "if we undertook it with a sincere regard to His honour, the service of our gracious King, and (which is the same thing), the public good."

Unfortunately, no record survives of Whitefield's response. The proposition would undoubtedly have been appealing as it spoke to precisely the sort of project Whitefield would seek to implement and suggested precisely the right friend. Yet the timing was bad. Whitefield's health was shaky at that time, and he could not travel widely. While Franklin was wrong about his own imminent "finish," he was not far off the mark with Whitefield. Nevertheless, the proposition stands as an unequaled testimony to the trust and friendship Franklin exhibited toward his itinerant friend.

With Franklin in England from 1757 to 1762, the two continued to enjoy their friendship and, as we shall see in a later chapter, to help each other greatly. Even as Franklin offered support for the orphan house and Whitefield's dream of converting Bethesda into a southern college, so Whitefield supported Franklin's efforts to establish the Philadelphia Academy (later the University of Pennsylvania) and urged that the school use the "New Building" originally constructed for his revivals. Whitefield also proved to be Franklin's steady political ally in the face of critics in both England and America.

Franklin termed their friendship not a spiritual affinity but a "mere Civil Friendship." Yet the "mere" should not be taken to imply superficiality or a passing acquaintance. In fact, for these two with lives so utterly public and so privately bankrupt, their friendship proved uniquely reliable. In important ways their friendship was stronger because there was no spiritual affinity. In effect, each humanized the other and, in powerful ways, confirmed the other in the choices they made. Without the common foundation of methodist society or junto, each was freed to see in the other a true friend who transcended party interests, a friend who could be trusted in a profoundly untrustworthy world.

Neither converted the other, though Whitefield never ceased trying. After reading the cleverly composed epitaph in which Franklin likened his life to an old volume that, with death, would hopefully be restored "in a new and more perfect Edition, corrected and amended by the Author," Whitefield replied: "I have seen your Epitaph. Believe on Jesus, and get a feeling possession of God in you, and you cannot possibly be disappointed of your expected second edition, finely corrected, and infinitely amended."

Though unconverted, Franklin was not unappreciative. Whitefield, alone among clergymen, had earned the right to preach to him. Small wonder, then, that in a letter to his brother John written toward the end of Whitefield's life, Franklin inquired into the health of his old friend and closed with the poignant confession: "He is a good man and I love him."

At the same time Whitefield was introducing his spectacular brand of revivalism to Anglo-American audiences, the English theater was undergoing a transformation of its own. The age of Whitefield was no less the age of David Garrick, and audiences thrilled to the actor Garrick's novel presentation of a more "natural" drama. Interestingly, descriptions of Garrick's popular performances are virtually interchangeable with descriptions of Whitefield's preaching. A contemporary description of Garrick's debut before London audiences in the summer of 1741 by Garrick's friend and biographer Arthur Murphy reads much like accounts of young Whitefield in the fields:

The power of his imagination was such, that he transformed himself into the very man; the passions rose in rapid succession, and, before he uttered a word, were legible in every feature of that various face. His look, his voice, his attitude, changed with every sentiment.... He made a most astonishing impression on the audience.... In all this, the audience saw an exact imitation of nature.

In advance of established churches and other arts, both the world of the revivals and the world of the stage recognized the signs of the times and responded creatively. Both appealed to the new popular, democratic, and marketing forces that were shaping the age in ways that repudiated conventional and aristocratic rhetorical formulas. In their capacity both to entertain and to mold powerful cultural myths, the theater and revivals were without rival. Sports could entertain and literature could enlighten, but neither could do both with the power and appeal of theater and mass revivals. In both, ordinary people discovered characters like themselves at the center of discourse. Whether caught up in a contemporary stage romance or recreated in a Whitefield rendition of Zaccheus, ordinary people saw themselves become the subject of record. They took from this a newfound sense of importance and in turn gave their eager support - and money. What they began has continued to the present electronic age, and it has become clear that religion and drama represent the two most popular and powerful myth-makers in modem American society.

Inevitably the innovators of stage and revival found themselves locked in mortal combat with one another as they attacked the mores of their culture from opposite sides - the actors flouting their "immorality," and the evangelicals renouncing the world. Yet, in profound if unacknowledged ways, the two were unwitting allies in a united campaign against a passing traditional order. Both were countercultures that stood at the margins of traditional institutions and responded with alienation and opposition. Both called into question social and sexual customs as well as attitudes toward dress and hair style. Female methodist exhorters and female actors (both innovations on their respective "stages") could be found smoking pipes in public and speaking in loud, aggressive voices that defied traditional customs and challenged established gender roles. Finally, and most significantly, both appealed with unrivaled power to the private self in a world increasingly deprived of traditional moral and spiritual public centers.

Despite their different worlds, eighteenth-century actors and revivalists became increasingly aware of one another. When the youthful Garrick introduced his natural rendition of Shakespeare's Richard III, an angry rival actor, James Quin, dismissed him with the quip that "this is the wonder of a day; Garrick is a new religion; the people follow him as another Whitefield, but they will soon return to church again." In fact, Garrick's audiences, like Whitefield's, were there to stay. But the parallels to Whitefield were not lost on Garrick. In response to Quin's public quip, Garrick composed an epigram playing positively on the interconnections of theater, church, and Whitefield:

For his part, Whitefield recognized the theater as the church's greatest rival. Wherever he preached, he did his best to close down the playhouses. On his first visit to Philadelphia, he caused a great stir by converting the dancing school master and changing the school into an institution for blacks. In Charleston, one of the American centers where theater got a start, he railed against the art and took pride in decreased theater attendance during his stay there. On his seventh visit to Scotland in 1753, he spoke near a Glasgow theater and angrily denounced playgoing. Later, when the playhouse was dismantled, authorities blamed Whitefield for inciting the mob that brought it down. The irony was certainly not lost on Whitefield. The notion that he, of all people, would incite a mob was "entirely false." Nevertheless, he did concede that "I thought it my duty to shew the evil of having a play-house erected in a trading city - almost, too, before the very door of the university."

In London, Whitefield's blasts against the major playhouses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were well known and frequent. Yet actors and playwrights frequently attended his performances and invariably saw in him one of their own. Garrick, like Franklin, could immediately distinguish the polished performances from the new creations. By the tenth or fifteenth performance, Whitefield's delivery was so tuned that Garrick marveled at his art and was led to exclaim, "I would give a hundred guineas if I could say 'Oh!' like Mr. Whitefield." Playwright, actor, and comedian Samuel Foote also attended Whitefield's sermons and was impressed by the art, if not the subject matter. According to the ex-Methodist and ardent theatergoer James Lockington, "Mr. Foote was struck by stepping in by chance, and once hearing Whitefield; the mixture of whose absurdity, whim, consequence, and extravagance, pleased his fancy and entertained him highly."

Others from the theater were more than simply pleased or "entertained." Whitefield, alone among eighteenth-century preachers, converted actors. In New York, one of his converts, a "strolling player," left the theater to work at the orphan house. In London, the renowned comic actor Edward Shuter became a frequent visitor to the Tabernacle and a great supporter of Whitefield's ministry. Whitefield, in turn, gave Shuter the dubious honor of being addressed directly in one of his sermons, recounted here by Cornelius Winter:

The famous comedian, Shuter, who had a great partiality for Mr. Whitefield, showed him friendship, and often attended his ministry. At one period of his popularity he was acting in a drama under the character of Ramble. During the run of the performance he attended service on sabbath at Tottenham-court chapel, and was seated in the pew exactly opposite to the pulpit, and while Mr. Whitefield was giving full sally to his soul, and in his energetic address, was inviting sinners to the Saviour, he fixed himself full against Shuter, with his eye upon him, adding, to what he had previously said, "And thou, poor Ramble, who hast long rambled from him, come you also. 0 end your rambling by coming to Jesus."

Shuter was understandably unnerved by the direct public reference, but he remained an admirer. Whitefield, in turn, paid Shuter the ultimate tribute by allowing his own listeners one trip to the Garrick stage: to see Shuter in a benefit performance.

As long as Whitefield and the theater kept a respectful distance, all was well. But when either strayed too close to the other's turf - and customers - trouble followed. If players performed too close to churches or schools, Whitefield screamed. And if Whitefield spoke on the greens on market days, he encountered sustained opposition from the actors.

A crisis was reached in 1756 and 1757. In casting about for new preaching locations, Whitefield sought to gain a preaching stronghold at Long Acre, a fashionable street adjacent to the theater district. The Long Acre chapel had been built earlier, and the Wesleys had preached there without disturbance. But Whitefield was another story. He threatened theater business directly with his pulpit attacks and entertaining style. Those of the theater world viewed his preaching there as an encroachment on their market. Whitefield so effectively wedded drama to pulpit that they feared the secular theater would founder. People's need for dramatic expression would be satisfied in the revivals, while their own performances would be suppressed as a perversion of gospel drama.

Throughout 1756 Whitefield preached at Long Acre and railed against the stage. And the more he preached, the more he coveted the location as a permanent preaching place modeled on the Tabernacle: it was the perfect location from which to bait the actors in their lair. Throughout his twice-weekly sermons, he invariably singled out actors and theatergoing for condemnation and sought to reduce the theaters' audiences.

Not every actor took Whitefield's censure as lightly as Edward Shuter, though many came to a grudging admiration of him as a worthy competitor. James Lockington, present at many of Whitefield's services, rated his pulpit drama "beyond compare." This, he added, was not surprising, for Whitefield "had been really and truly an actor on the stage in the early part of his life."

Lockington's educated ear for dialect, mimicry, and improvisation enabled him to capture Whitefield's pulpit style and speech in a way that eluded most journalistic and ministerial descriptions. Most noticeable to Lockington was Whitefield's distinctive enunciation: "Lund instead of Lord, Gud instead of God, as 0 Lurd Gud." In one sermon at Long Acre, Lockington recorded Whitefield's extemporaneous remarks, diction and all. Knowing that many of his hearers had just come from a play, Whitefield used the occasion to condemn the theater:

"You go to plays! and what do you see there! Why, if you will not tell me, I will tell you what you see there! - When you see the players on the stage, you see the devil's children grinning at you; and when you go to the playhouse, I suppose you go in ruffles - I wonder whether St. Paul wore ruffles? No; there were no ruffles in those days. I am told," he continued archly, "that people say I bawl, and I will bawl -I will not be a velvet-mouthed preacher, I will not speak the word of Gud in a sleepy manner, like your church preachers - I'll tell you a story. The Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1675, was acquainted with Mr. Butterton the player. One day the arch bishop ... said to Butterton . . . "pray inform me Mr. Butterton, what is the reason you actors on the stage can affect your congregations with speaking of things imaginary, as if they were real, while we in church speak of things real, which our congregations only receive as if they were imaginary?" "Why my Lord says Butterton, the reason is very plain. We actors on the stage, speak of things imaginary, as if they were real, and you in the pulpit speak of things real, as if they were imaginary." "Therefore," added Whitefield, "I will bawl, I will not be a velvet-mouthed preacher."

Sermons like this, both entertaining and biting, did not sit well with the actors' guild. In response, they did their best to disrupt Whitefield's Long Acre preaching. The loud clangings of bells, drums, clappers, and cleavers all interrupted the itinerant's sermons. When this seemed insufficient, the actors pelted Whitefield and his supporters with stones. While no serious injuries ensued, there was great irritation.

Whitefield sought redress for the disturbances. In a letter to Bishop Pearce, he complained that inside the chapel "some of the windows were stopped up, to prevent, in some degree, the congregation being disturbed by the unhallowed noise; but large stones were thrown in at another window, and one young person was sadly wounded." Beyond this, he darkly hinted that the rioters had "been hired by subscription," perhaps by actors, perhaps by bishops.

When the bishop ignored Whitefield's letter, he wrote another, insisting that the disturbance was "more than noise. It is premeditated rioting." The noise was so loud that "many women have been almost frightened to death."

In fact, the physical damage done seems to have been minimal. The real weapon was the noise. Whitefield wanted a toehold in the theater district, and the actors were equally determined that he should not have it. This was one battle Whitefield would not win. The Wesleys - who never threatened the theater as Whitefield did -would stay nearby, but Whitefield would not. Unable to overcome the incessant noise, he finally gave up the Long Acre project and shifted his efforts to the construction of a new building at Tottenham Court. The building was completed in late 1756, allowing Whitefield to divide his London time between it and the Tabernacle. Thereafter, Long Acre remained out-of-bounds.

When read as cultural history, Whitefield's contest with the Long Acre players represents a fascinating window into social change and the new forces appearing in the English marketplace. As we have seen, Whitefield and the theater were both voices of the future for many of the same reasons. Yet the futures they represented would not begin to be reconciled until the twentieth century. Throughout much of modem Protestant history, the theater and motion pictures have been viewed as the "devil's workshop." Only with the advent of television has secular drama been approved - and consumed - in evangelical circles.

Whitefield apparently never perceived - certainly never articulated - the parallel ways in which he and the theater were creating new markets for their particular services. But the parallels were not lost on his opponents. After one particularly hostile anti-theater sermon, a writer for the Monthly Review defended the art of the theater by exposing Whitefield's own theatricality and self-marketing. The stone throwing and noise were no less regrettable than Whitefield's rash identification of all contemporary theater with Satan:

We hope the pious orator, Mr. Whitefield, made some reserve in favour of those who frequent the theatres.... But, after all, it were no wonder, that a Whitefield, or a Wesley should be jealous of so powerful a rival as Garrick; or even a Woodward, a Shuter, or a Yates. However, it must be allowed uncharitable in any performers, or managers, thus to consign each other's audiences to the devil. We hope our good friends of Drury Lane and Covent Garden have never been chargeable with such unfair and unChristian dealings. Emulation is certainly commendable, while accompanied with honesty and decency; and if we can improve and extend our traffic by furnishing a better commodity than another can, why, it is all fair; but neither decency nor honesty will allow us to break the windows, or to abuse or frighten away the customers, of our rivals in trade.

The writer's insights are important. At base, Whitefield and the actors made similar complaints. Each accused the other of driving away their "customers" and, in the process, of interrupting the "trade" between the performer and his "audience." In the emerging new order, Whitefield and the theater fought for a market share according to new rules governed less by mercantile controls and elite institutions - be they church, state, or aristocracy - than by market forces and the sheer power of public opinion. As countercultures, both the revivals and the stage threatened the life of well-regulated traditional churches and communities. Both served notice on the established order of church and society that its days were numbered. And both conducted their assaults through the avenues of the passions and the imagination - the two central domains of the modern private self.

In their own ways, both Whitefield and Garrick were "charismatic" personalities whose power derived from their ability to plumb the depths of human passion and literally re-present the human condition in all its various poses. Both Whitefield and Garrick were accused of being "licentious." In a literal sense, they were: both took license with the old forms and rules of society to create new forms capable of speaking to a new society.

As Whitefield sought to use his stage, the pulpit, to destroy the theater, so the theater took after Whitefield in its own way. Garrick, Foote, and Woodward all saw in Whitefield a rival worthy of contest. They challenged him not with stones and bells but on the stage itself, using the most powerful weapons at their disposal: mimicry, comedy, satire, and ridicule. They crossed the line separating art and reality to attack religion as they had earlier attacked courtly politics, legalistic morals, and polite manners. And they produced a living satire using Whitefield as they had used other real people in the imaginary setting of the stage - with devastating consequences. By holding their opponent up to ridicule, they effectively cut him down to laughable, life-sized proportions.

The first staged attacks on Whitefield actually dated from 1746, when Drury Lane produced Charles Macklin's play A Will and No Will. The play was followed by a scurrilous "afterpiece" that introduced a Methodist itinerant preacher caught in an adulterous situation. In the play an older widow, Shark, confessed to her Uncle Skin that she was pregnant. When asked to identify her "bedfellow" she replied,

You must know uncle, I am greatly addicted to be afraid of spirits, ghosts, witches, and fairies, and so to prevent terrifying dreams and apparitions I took a religious gentleman, a very good man, to be with me - an itinerant Methodist, one Doctor Preach Field.

SKIN: "Doctor Preach Field, I have heard of him."

SHARK: "0 he's a very good man uncle I assure you."

With that, the comedy was on, and the field preacher exposed for his base, sensual ends.

As theater and Whitefield shared many of the same dramatic secrets, so they directed at one another the same charge of sexual immorality. Both worked to establish their cases in the eighteenth-century contest of virtue and vice. Actors ridiculed both the integrity of revivalists, suggesting abuse of their charisma for immoral purposes, and their theology, suggesting a form of cheap grace that entitled the sinner to continue in immorality, certain of being saved by faith alone.

The actors' campaign against Whitefield peaked in 1760, when Samuel Foote wrote and starred in a satiric comedy entitled The Minor at Garrick's Drury Lane Theater. The play opened with two characters, named Crank and Foote, musing over possible new characters to satirize. Crank suggested a Scotchman or an Irishman, but this was old hat. Foote then made the daring suggestion that they ridicule an "itinerant field orator." Crank was not sure; fooling around with a churchman could be dangerous. But Foote assured him this was wrongheaded. Itinerants were not untouchable. In fact, Foote claimed, they operated in the very same world as the theater:

FOOTE: Now I look upon it in a different manner. I consider these gentlemen in the light of public performers like myself; and whether we exhibit at Tottenham-Court, or the Hay-Market our purpose is the same, and the place is immaterial.

Foote went on to note that satiric comedy was the only weapon players could use in responding to the itinerant's condemnations. They had no force of arms or institutional allies to fight the methodist challenge: "ridicule is the only antidote against this pernicious poison. Methodism is a madness that arguments can never cure; and should a little wholesome severity be applied, persecution would be the immediate cry. Where then can we have recourse but to the comic muse?" Actors were no more rioters than itinerants. And, like itinerants, they could call upon no traditional institution or agency for protection. They had no traditional controls to invoke because, like the methodists, they were extrainstitutional. Like the preachers, they would have to attack their enemies and defend their persons solely on the basis of their power to persuade and move an audience.

With that the decision was made. Whitefield was to have one last character to play - or rather to be played for him. The character was "Dr. Squintum." In a classic case of reality imitating art, Whitefield would forever after be burlesqued in prints, cartoons, and satires as the Foote character "Squintum." The cross-eyed stare that enhanced his speaking presence was singled out for attention and satire on the stage.

In the play, Squintum was cast alongside a procurer named Mrs. Cole, who frequented Squintum's sermons and rejoiced when he "stept in with his saving grace, got me regenerate, and another creature." Despite her conversion, Mrs. Cole continued to ply her illicit trade, prompting another character to observe "with what ease she reconciles her new birth to her old calling! No wonder these preachers have plenty of proselytes, whilst they have the address so comfortably to blend the hitherto jarring interests of the two worlds."

As the play progresses, a theologically naive Mrs. Cole encourages a young girl to a life of methodism and prostitution with the words: "Don't you remember what Mr. Squintum said? A woman's not worth saving, that won't be guilty of a swinging sin; for they have matter to repent upon."

Foote would have been the first to acknowledge that Whitefield never encouraged immorality, let alone prostitution, in his preaching. Yet Foote made an underlying point. By proclaiming a message of free grace to the exclusion of all works, and by promising perfect strangers that a New Birth could erase any old sins, Whitefield could all too easily encourage a transformation of free grace into cheap grace. And undoubtedly that was a licentious message that some of Whitefield's common hearers took from his sermons.

Foote perverted Whitefield's theology to make a point, but his satire of itinerant preaching was no more a perversion of reality than Whitefield's damnation of all theater as "the devil's masterpiece." Each saw weaknesses in the other that he was incapable of seeing in himself.

Foote's play generated a scandal which, like all scandals, simply increased public interest. After a successful run at Drury Lane, the play repeated its success at Covent Garden. Soon it was playing in all the provinces, with later editions turning up as far away as Charleston and New York City.

Foote had hit upon a successful theme. The Minor was soon followed by other productions that added methodist religion to their list of victims for ridicule. In 1761, Garrick followed up with The Register Office, a comedy in the new mode of two acts, in which "Mr. Watchlight" and "Mrs. Snarewell" played to Squintum and Mrs. Cole. That same year Foote produced another assault unambiguously titled The Methodist. This play, however, exceeded even the theater's broad toleration, and Garrick suppressed it.

Methodists were predictably scandalized by the theater attacks. Lady Huntington implored Garrick to halt production. He refused but promised to soften some of the more biting commentary. Later Whitefield biographers shared in the outrage. Luke Tyerman mentioned the plays only to dismiss them as the work of that "profane and filthy-minded comedian" Samuel Foote.

Criticism of the theater's satire was not limited to methodists and their supporters. Respectable reviewers also found it reprehensible. Indeed, if anyone was more distasteful to them than a strolling itinerant, it was a licentious actor or playwright. In August 1760 the Monthly Review condemned Foote and Garrick for "debasing the stage" by introducing "real and living characters into his pieces." A follow-up letter protested "such Scandalous liberties with Names" as an "insufferable" contempt. Once again, the upstart stage had struck too close to home by blurring the line between art and reality. If ministers could be reviled by name, so also could magistrates and aristocrats, and with that, all social order would be brought into contempt.

Foote and Garrick defended the plays on the grounds of art. Like Whitefield twenty years earlier, they were challenging the right of hierarchy to prescribe morality or delineate the boundaries of art. In their own ways, actors and field preachers were both demanding the freedom to define their art before the bar of public opinion. In the new courtroom, success, not classical categories of art, would be their criterion and barometer. Between them, revivalists and theater owners made "head counts" a science in the emerging social order governed by market forces and voluntary support rather than direction from above.

As a celebrity, Whitefield soon became fair game not only for newspapers and playwrights but also for the popular new markets in prints and caricatures. Once introduced to the public spectacle, he took his place with other celebrities and became the frequent butt of their jokes to a much greater extent than the Wesleys or Moravians. Indeed, a whole genre of Whitefield prints appeared portraying the itinerant in an unfavorable light. Most notable was a spate of portraits and cartoons suggesting that Whitefield was having an affair with an American Indian princess.

In 1761 William Hogarth brought his biting satire to bear on Whitefield again with a print entitled "Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism," in which he depicted an audience of insane people driven to bedlam by a cross-eyed preacher. Others followed suit. In middle age, Whitefield had become transformed from the comely young celebrity to the squinteyed ranter. When not mocking the enthusiasm of Whitefield's ignorant listeners, the printers portrayed the itinerant's presumed immorality. In one print, Whitefield appeared in the pulpit holding a bag of money and crying out: "You are all Damn'd that go to hear Foote. Verily I say unto you he is a Child of Hell." In the same print, however, Whitefield is pictured surrounded by female listeners and admirers. One old lady remarks, "0 what a Pious Creature he is." Next to her, a young woman mischievously exclaims, "I wish his Spirit was in my Flesh." Through much of his life, Whitefield had been on the offensive with his barbs and biting sarcasm. Now, older and weakened, he found himself the object of parody.

In May 1763 a print emerged explicitly linking Whitefield to Foote's play. Entitled "Dr. Squintum's Exaltation or the Reformation," it shows Whitefield in the marketplace surrounded by lewd and disorderly listeners. Beneath the print appears some doggerel including the following lines:

Throughout the scurrilous campaign on stage and in print, Whitefield said very little. His refusal to reply to the new round of public attacks was motivated less by saintly with drawal than by illness and an inability to rise to the occasion. As the crescendo peaked in the early 1760s, Whitefield was partially disabled, preaching on a drastically reduced schedule, and cutting down his correspondence and public appearances. Unable to do serious battle with theater, he was nonetheless aware of the play and may even have taken perverse pleasure in seeing himself on stage. To one friend he confided in a letter: "I am now mimicked and burlesqued upon the public stage. All hail such contempt!"

Throughout all this satire, the lesson was clear. If religion could be marketed, then, like politics, quackery, and prostitution, it could also be mimicked, demeaned, and condemned. On one level - the level seen by Whitefield's early biographers -the insults were a scandal. On another level -the level Whitefield himself recognized - they were back-handed tributes to his status as a celebrity. No other religious personality had scaled such heights. No other understood the media - or, for that matter, the market - as Whitefield did.

In their own ways, Whitefield and Garrick, to say nothing of Franklin, were of a piece. They gave as good as they got, and they asked no quarter save that the market be open and they be given a fair chance to tap it. The age belonged to all of them. Garrick and Franklin lived out most of their century presiding over a new stage and a new nation. Time would not be so kind to Whitefield. But there was still one more hurrah.

By December of 1760, as the theater battles peaked, Whitefield was unable to rise to the occasion. Indeed, such was the state of his health that he was barely able to rise at all. Through much of the following two years he was a virtual invalid, confined to bed and forbidden to preach. The traditional cures no longer worked as they had in his earlier bouts with illness and exhaustion. A visit to the mineral waters at Bath left him as weak "as before." In October 1761, on the advice of Edinburgh's finest physicians, he entered a regimen of mild exercise, mustard seed, and silence - the latter being "the painful thing," and in fact impossible. While still in Edinburgh he confided to John Wesley that he could not resist a little exhortation: "I spoke a little . . . in a private room." And then added the almost desperate wish, "may you, my Dear Friend, never be stopped till you breathe your last."

Unable to preach, a recovering Whitefield determined to travel. If travel was always Whitefield's best remedy, America was always his favorite destination. War with France and his own waning health had precluded an American visit for eight long years, but in that time Whitefield had remained fully informed concerning religious and political developments in the New World. He had read American newspapers regularly and frequently expressed his frustration at the extended separation. In a cajolatory letter to Lady Pepperell during the war with France, he confessed, "How did I wish to be transported to America! How did I long to stir up all against the common enemy.... Dear New England, - dear Boston lies upon my heart!"

With the Peace of Paris signed in 1763, Whitefield planned an immediate return to America, but again his body let him down. Excited planning brought on asthmatic difficulties, and the trip had to be postponed to summer. He did not arrive in Virginia until August, at which point he immediately left for the cooler climes of Pennsylvania and his beloved Presbyterian audiences.

In Pennsylvania he resumed preaching at the reduced rate of three times a week. His reception was predictably large and enthusiastic, but old friends noted that the past eight years had not been kind. Whitefield's body showed the ravages of time. In place of the buoyant, youthful-looking Whitefield, audiences encountered a much older and more corpulent Whitefield - the figure who in fact is featured in most of his portraits. He moved and breathed with difficulty, and could not sustain the bursts of passion that had formerly marked his ministry.

But still the crowds flocked. They came partly from respect, partly from curiosity, and partly just to hear an American legend. Absence did little to dim the American memory of their great evangelical friend or lessen their appreciation. Wherever Whitefield traveled, word-of-mouth reports spread the news of his arrival. Listeners who were too young personally to remember the earlier Whitefield heard stories from those who had been there. Sales of Whitefield's journals increased as Americans reminded themselves of the fearless institution baiter who could draw thousands at the mention of his name. Ministers recalled the effects of Whitefield oratory on their parishioners. The German pietist Henry Melchior Muhlenberg had been present at many of Whitefield's sermons over the years and marveled at his continued ability to move audiences. He recalled how "the honorable Mr. Whitefield had the gift [of oratory] in his younger years, and by it whole crowds were sometimes carried away as though they had been betwitched." By way of illustration, Muhlenberg recalled one occasion on which Whitefield arrived late to his preaching destination. Another preacher had begun a sermon on a "powerful text," but to no effect. Then Whitefield arrived. On seeing him, the ineffective preacher immediately gave up the discourse and, with hardly a minute's thought, Whitefield picked up on the same text. The effects were electric:

Mr. Whitefield had scarcely spoken for a minute on the same text when the whole auditorium could be seen to be deeply moved, to be in tears, and to be wringing hands, and the sighing, weeping, and shouting of the people could be heard. Is it not possible that name and fame, preconceptions and fancies play a part in the synergism? Weeping, laughing, yawning, sneezing, etc. are contagious, and they seem to have something in common with electricity.

On another occasion, Muhlenberg recalled how a German woman had come on foot to hear Whitefield preach in Philadelphia. She did not speak English, but such was the power of Whitefield's "gestures, expressions, look, and voice" that "on her return she asserted that never in all her life had she had such a quickening, awakening, and edifying experience."

Besides identifying himself with the earlier American revivals, Whitefield invariably identified himself - and his hearers - with the cause of America. Memories of victory over France were still fresh, and Whitefield did not hesitate to identify the same divine providence in war that he had earlier associated with revival. His unending bursts of passion for the New Birth he now coupled with increasing celebrations of his "dear America." Thirteen separate colonies were well along the road to a collective identity, and no single figure was more representative of that unity than Whitefield.

In short, since the Louisbourg campaign of 1745, Whitefield had become an American icon - the first intercolonial hero. In America, the religious lessons of the revivals automatically contained political applications. If Americans could unite successfully in religion, then they could unite in politics and war - a transition that Whitefield exemplified as recruiter for the Louisbourg expedition.

In an era about to experience a new generation of political revolutionaries and statesmen whose names would dominate "American" history, it is easy to forget that America's first intercolonial hero was a preacher, not a politician. From a twentieth-century vantage point, it is also easy to forget how extraordinarily difficult it was to forge a common identity for thirteen colonies that were, in effect, separate nations. Unparalleled pluralism and intercolonial rivalries virtually precluded any single magistrate from "speaking for" the larger, as yet uncreated whole. Here Whitefield was particularly well placed for success. He claimed no particular American region as his own nor promoted any denomination over another. All Americans could claim Whitefield without sacrificing their particularity.

Not only had Whitefield brought American Calvinists together, but he had done so in a brash, combative style with a hostility toward external authority that fit well with American self-confidence following war with France. Americans knew and read of Whitefield's frequent sermons on their behalf during the war with France and of his many charitable efforts on behalf of Boston and the American colleges. Although separated, he remained present through his unending campaign for colonial causes. No one dared condemn the self-made hero.

Only Whitefield, the Anglican Calvinist with an American soul, had bridged the cultural, religious, and linguistic chasms separating colonial identities and shown how true unity could be achieved. By the 1760s he had come to symbolize that unity in ways that transcended religion altogether. The new corporate consciousness he personified was at once religious, cultural, and, in a short time, ideological and military. The lessons first learned in the mass revivals - the virtue of popular mobilization, the rhetoric of a "common cause," submission to the "public will" - all contained double meanings that Whitefield would not discourage in the years to come, even as the "tyrant" label shifted from France to England.

Throughout 1764 and 1765, there was no angry American theater belitthng Whitefield on the stage. Neither were there any working-class mobs disrupting his ministry in the "fields." Wherever he traveled, old battles were forgotten and old antagonisms washed away in a sea of good feelings. When preaching in Philadelphia and New York, he invariably encountered a "prodigious crowded auditory," including many who were seeing the famed evangelist for the first time. They knew nothing of the "Great Awakening" that first launched Whitefield's American career, but they knew Whitefield the American symbol, and they flocked in numbers that exceeded the records of 1740. In Boston, such was the enthusiasm that audiences ignored the travel prohibitions brought on by a smallpox epidemic and took their chances just to see Whitefield.

The colleges were no less grateful than the citizenry. Princeton had always been Whitefield's favorite American college because of its connections to the Log College. By the unanimous request of president, tutors, and students, Whitefield attended Princeton's commencement and delivered a "very striking and animated exhortation" to the graduates. Harvard College had long since forgiven Whitefield his youthful indiscretions but had not forgotten how he had worked in England to secure books for their library after a devastating fire. They welcomed him to the campus as a "friend" both to the college and America. Yale College followed suit and urged him to preach to the students. An ailing Whitefield complied and went beyond the allotted time when President Clap pleaded to "give them one more quarter of an hour's exhortation."

Most significantly, the ever-expanding colonial press fell unanimously in line behind Whitefield. His revivals had helped create the sort of news that fueled the establishment of newspapers in every large city in the colonies. In 1764, as the concerns of the press shifted, they did not forget the Grand Itinerant. Ever since Louisbourg, the newspapers had been directing public attention from revivals to politics and war. But Whitefield proved an exception. Wherever he spoke, printed itineraries prepared the way, together with lavish praise for his ongoing triumphs. Even opposition editors fell in line. The Boston Evening Press, once his greatest American antagonist, joined the wave of praise with extended descriptions of Whitefield's sermons and an editorial lament: "what a pity that such a god-like man's constitution is almost worn out by Apostolic Labours!" Papers throughout the colonies reported Whitefield's visit to a New York jail where, "being informed that no provision was made for the support of the debtors, he generously gave, out of his purse, enough to purchase ten cords of wood for the use of the poorest prisoners." They also carried the story of his public citation in Boston for efforts to secure relief in London for Bostonians left homeless by the Great Fire of 1760.

In June of 1764 Whitefield delivered his Boston farewell sermon in the friendly confines of the Old South meetinghouse. The gathering proved somber as many realized they might be hearing Whitefield for the last time. The following report appeared in the Boston Gazette and was picked up by newspapers throughout the colonies:

The notice he gave of his departure was sudden; and it was the more affecting to his friends, as there is but little reason to expect he will ever have an opportunity of making another visit here. His lectures have been at tended by persons of Figure and Rank, as well as others; and in the opinion of those of his Hearers who are allowed to be the best Judges, they have been adapted to promote the common cause of Christianity.

Contained in these accounts were many of the accolades that could be found in earlier accounts of Whitefield in America and Scotland. But there was also something new. A new language, more political than religious, had begun to shape descriptions of American revivals. Revivals had always given political lessons, but a dawning political self-consciousness was now giving back its vocabulary to religion. Increasingly, descriptions of Whitefield's style and message were fused with the rhetoric of America's rising political consciousness of itself as a free people. A distinctively American phraseology appeared in journalistic accounts of the revivals, peppered with such phrases as "common cause" and describing popular audiences as "the best judges" of who and what they would support. Such rhetoric was not conspicuous among Scottish Presbyterians or English methodists but came increasingly to express the American temper in religion and politics.

This language would soon grow far louder in political contexts than in the earlier religious debates of the 1740s. In all of this, Whitefield was identified by his Bostonian hearers as a champion and fellow spirit. No one demurred when the Boston Evening Post summarized his tour with the recognition that "he has met with great acceptance among all Denominations of judicious Christians, and we trust Religious Impressions which will never be erased, are formed upon the minds of many."

From Boston Whitefield traveled slowly south, spending the month of October in Philadelphia. By late fall he was in Virginia and the Carolinas, where he observed yet another "great awakening," this time in the South. He did not know that this was to be the last American "revival" he would witness. In response to the impassioned exhortations of Baptist itinerants, Presbyterian New Lights such as Samuel Davies, and evangelical Anglicans such as Deveraux Jarratt, huge numbers of Virginians were entering the churches. Whitefield rejoiced to play a part in awakenings in which such a "vast alteration" could be recognized among the people. Although weakened by the travel, he preached at Northern Neck, likening the enthusiasm there to the halcyon days of revival in Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambuslang.

On December 3, 1764, eighteen months after his arrival in America, Whitefield at last arrived "home" at Bethesda. Bethesda had never been Whitefield's residence for more than a few months at a time, yet it had secured a lifelong loyalty and substantial financial commitment from him. Soon after his arrival, Whitefield printed a formal accounting of orphanhouse finances. The widely reported results were staggering. With no help from the Georgia legislature or the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Whitefield had managed to raise amounts of money without equal in American philanthropy to that time. Though never wealthy himself, Whitefield's own contributions totaled over £2,000. Even more impressive were the public offerings accumulated over the preceding twenty-five years. In all, "the sum of £12,855 has been laid out for the same house since the 7th of January 1739 to this day" - a figure exceeding the entire budget of the Georgia legislature in 1764. Along with this report came the auditor's record "that it cloth not appear that any charge has ever been made by the said Rev. Mr Whitefield, either for travelling charges or any other expenses whatever; and that no salary has been made for any person whatever."

Reports of Whitefield's munificence at the Georgia orphan house worked the same transformations in southern elite attitudes that had been evoked in the North. Perhaps no single figure had done more to establish the colony than Whitefield. In a letter from Georgia reprinted in the Boston Evening Post, a writer noted that "many sensible people say that if it had not been for this house, the Province would have been deserted; for the new settlers (poor people) had recourse here, after their work was done, to good lodgings and Provisions on free cost." Whitefield himself was pleased to note that "peace and plenty reign at Bethesda. His Excellency dined with me yesterday, and expressed his satisfaction in the warmest terms."

Whitefield took advantage of his new acceptance by pursuing an idea that had begun to germinate in England during his ministry to the nobility. Why not transform the orphan house into a college? Like Franklin he wanted to end with something big - a grand gesture. In fact, neither man was immune to the allure of creating a personal monument. And for both, the preferred location was America. In Whitefield's case, the monument of choice would be a new, evangelical American college. Whitefield would not be the last revivalist to translate an anti-intellectual style into an academic college of his own, but he was the first. Having repudiated all invitations to found denominations, he settled instead on transforming Bethesda into an evangelical college for the South. This would be his crowning legacy to posterity.

It had been apparent to Whitefield for some time that the South needed a "school of prophets" modeled on institutions in their neighboring colonies to the North. The recent advances of southern evangelicals confirmed the need for an institutional training ground that could prepare responsible citizens and gospel preachers. Princeton served as Whitefield's model. After speaking at the commencement ceremonies there, Whitefield spent an additional week studying the college's charter, curriculum, and organization. Much of what he saw there he incorporated in his own preliminary plans for "Bethesda College."

Clearly a college required far more support than the not insubstantial needs of the orphan house. The Princeton study convinced him that additional resources would have to be secured from church and state, and this meant courting old antagonists. Given the secular as well as religious purposes of the college, Whitefield turned initially to the Georgia legislature. In a memorial to Gov. James Wright, he outhned the successful history of the orphan house and went on to request a grant of two thousand acres to establish a college "for the education of persons of superior rank ... to serve their king, their Country, or their God either in Church or State." Taking Princeton as his model, Whitefield was careful to state his case in general academic terms that downplayed his evangelical designs. Without a college of its own, he argued, Georgia would lose its most talented youth to northern schools. In addition, Georgia would be unable to attract talent from other parts, particularly the "British west islands." To this calculated appeal to regional self-interest Whitefield added the personal promise of an additional £2,000 gift to build additional lodgings and support ten "poor students as servitors to the rest."

Whitefield assured the legislature that, once established, the day-to-day needs of the college would be covered by the same slave labor that had saved the orphan house. By his calculation, thirty slaves were more than enough to make Bethesda College self-supporting. Ever the Oxford servitor, he went on to urge "that the Negroe children belonging to the College shall be instructed in their intervals of labor by one of the poorest students [and] an additional provision for educating and maintaining a number of Indian children, which I imagine may easily be procured from the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and others." In return for lands and a charter, Whitefield promised both Georgia and the Privy Council that he would "make a free gift of all lands, negroes, goods, and chattels" to the college in his will.

Whitefield's petition was enthusiastically received by both houses of the Georgia Assembly. Again personal friendships were important. James Habersham, Whitefield's old ally and co-founder of the orphan house, had become a leading planter and president of the Upper House. With Habersham's encouragement, the Assembly awarded Bethesda the lands Whitefield requested, together with a commendatory preface endorsing the whole enterprise. In their widely printed en dorsement, the legislators praised the proposed college as one more instance of "the many and singular obligations Georgia has continually laid under to that Rev. Gentleman." It seemed that Georgia would soon have its college.

With lands, buildings, and slaves in place, Whitefield next turned to another old foe, the Anglican Church. With a charter from the Church, he could gain additional support through the offices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In a petition that again minimized his evangelical and dissenting designs, he appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a charter. This time, however, the appeal was denied. Unlike the Georgia legislature, the archbishop did not forget old grudges. Feelings still ran high against Whitefield's past censures, and the threatening growth of Methodism in England continued to be identified with his name. When presented with a bill for the college, the Archbishop signified his approval only on condition that "extempore" prayers not be allowed. That, of course, would eliminate the "broad bottom" of Whitefield's substantial support in the dissenting, evangelical communities, and thus effectively scuttled immediate hopes for an Anglican charter.

Undeterred, Whitefield returned to England in June 1765, determined to see his last ambition through. For help he turned to his old friend Benjamin Franklin, then in England as colonial agent. Earlier the two had "interviewed" often about "Georgia College" and its charter. Despite Franklin's frequent and impassioned arguments on behalf of the college, however, the Church remained adamant in refusing to grant any charter for an institution that was not explicitly Anglican and antiMethodist. Whitefield's American college, it was clear, would have to go it alone.

On returning to England, Whitefield had hoped to concentrate his waning energies on preaching and on the creation of his college. But events were mounting that would soon divert those energies to another American cause, one in which his friend Franklin played a central role.

In March of 1765, Parliament passed a Stamp Act tax in an effort to recoup debts incurred during the Seven Years War. As the chief beneficiary of these debts, Parliament had assumed that the colonists would be willing - if not eager - to shoulder some of the costs. Parliament was sadly mistaken. Instead of complying with the tax, Americans balked, citing their lack of representation in Parliament - an offense, they contended, against England's own constitution and the principle of popular representation in government. Throughout the summer of 1765 Whitefield's most consistent booster, the Boston Gazette, was filled with letters and essays protesting the Stamp Act as unconstitutional.

Even as Whitefield's hopes for a monument were fading, Franklin's were just beginning to grow with this storm. And Whitefield would be enlisted for badly needed support. In the summer of 1765, as colonists observed the zealous prosecutions of the vice admiralty courts and waited for the stamp tax to go into effect, voices of protest grew louder. The storm center was Boston, where many ministers, together with radical "Sons of Liberty" and minor officials such as Samuel and John Adams, joined to protest the act as an infringement on British "liberties." This was a language Whitefield understood well. But now its context was politics, not religion, and its focus was Parliament, not France or Catholicism. On August 14 the colonial protest spilled into violence as the Sons of Liberty attacked the home of the stamp collector Andrew Oliver. Twelve days later, violence flared again with attacks on the homes of William Story, deputy register of the vice admiralty court, and Benjamin Hallowell, comptroller of customs. From there the mob turned on the home of Deputy Governor Thomas Hutchinson, leaving nothing standing but the "the bare walls and floors."

Similar outbursts occurred in other colonies from New England to Georgia. While no respectable civil or ecclesiastical leaders approved of the violence of August 26, neither did they issue blanket condemnations of the mobs. The experience of the revivals had taught elites the futility of seeking to silence the populace once it had been aroused. New England's Congregational clergy, including many of Whitefield's closest allies, played a central role in protesting British "tyranny." In Boston, Samuel Cooper, together with Whitefield's old antagonist Charles Chauncy, had a hand in penning the libertarian letters pouring from the Boston Gazette. Throughout the autumn of 1765, Lyme's pro-revival pastor, Stephen Johnson, published a series of libertarian essays in the New London Gazette reminding American readers that "if you tamely part with [your liberties], you are accessory to your own death, and entail slavery on your posterity."

With growing alarm, Whitefield realized he might have to make a choice between his native England and his beloved America. His life's ministry had been premised on the broadest possible union of Anglo-American evangelicals. Now politics was threatening to undo everything and make a shambles of his international revival. Others, like John Wesley, were faced with similar dilemmas. But Wesley would remain loyal to England, and Whitefield could not. His institutional attachments and personal identification with the colonies were stronger than his loyalty to the crown.

Although far removed from the scene of the riots, Whitefield followed the news closely and relied on his American correspondents for information. A worried James Habersham wrote him in January 1766 describing "much confusion" ensuing from the Stamp Act. Personally, Habersham continued, he disapproved of the act, but not royal authority. The mob frightened him more than unconstitutional taxes: "Dreadful it is to find one's Person and Property at the Disposal of a giddy multitude." This, Habersham realized, was not the view of many American "patriots," nor was it Whitefield's perspective. Knowing his friend's loyalties and proclivity for sharing letters, he closed with a worried request that reflected the tensions of the time: "I must insist on your not making a use of this scrawl."

A second letter from Habersham, dated February 7, 1766, reported little improvement in "the terrible confusion we have been in here on account of the Stamp Act." His own sympathies to the crown had grown stronger in the aftermath of mounting colonial protests: "I detest and abhor, from every human and divine the intemperate Zeal, to say no worse shewn on this occasion throughout this Continent."

Although no friend to the "mob," Whitefield could not share Habersham's loyalties. Many patriot leaders were responsible members of Presbyterian and Congregational churches, and had always been more faithful allies than Anglicans, who tended to remain loyal to the crown. Whitefield's recent disappointment in the college charter only heightened his identification with the Calvinist dissenters and a movement that was increasingly theirs. Their grievances, moreover, echoed many of the religious issues that revivalists had raised earlier. At base, both involved questions of the extent of popular sovereignty.

In February of 1766 an embattled Franklin was called to answer before an angry House of Commons. Whitefield attended the sessions as Franklin's friend and consort. Throughout the hearings, the interrogations were sharp and hostile. If British courts would not countenance anti-Methodist mobs, even less would they tolerate American mobs opposed to their own authority. Somehow Franklin had to explain that there was a difference in American protests - namely, that they were not an expression of an American defiance of British law but rather loyalty to it. To Whitefield's pride and satisfaction, Franklin more than held his own in the debates. The critical issue was the subject of taxes. With mounting drama, Franklin held firm before his questioners:

Q. If the Stamp Act should be repealed, would it induce the assemblies of America to acknowledge the right of parliament to tax them, and would they erase their resolutions?

A. No, never.

Q. Is there no means of obliging them to erase those resolutions?

A. None, that I know of; they will never do it, unless compelled by force of arms.

Q. Is there a power on earth that can force them to erase them?

A. No power, how great soever, can force men to change their opinions.

Throughout the hearings Whitefield praised and defended his American friend: "Dr. Franklin has gained immortal honour by his behaviour at the bar of the House. His answer was always found equal to the questioner. He stood unappalled, gave pleasure to his friends, and did honour to his country." Whitefield's reference to Franklin's "country" is indicative of the independent American identity that he had grown to respect.

In response to Franklin's testimony and out of a desire to quiet controversies in the colonies, an angry Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. At the same time, however, they retained the Revenue Act as a symbolic show of authority. Franklin's testimony had convinced them (erroneously) that Americans objected chiefly to "internal" rather than "external," or trade taxes. In both cases, however, sovereignty lay with the Parliament. To confirm this, Parliament issued a Declaratory Act that claimed sovereignty over colonial affairs "in all cases whatsoever." Discerning minds saw in that Declaratory Act a portent of trouble. Clearly the immediate tensions had passed, but the underlying issues remained.

While Franklin's defense pleased Whitefield and did much to effect the repeal of the Stamp Act, it did not please all Americans. Many felt compromised by Franklin's distinction between internal and external taxes, believing that all such taxes from Parliament were unconstitutional. Soon Franklin came under fire from both sides. His sister had gotten angry letters in America, and Franklin encouraged her with some words from Whitefield:

So my dear sister, when you meet with any more such letters ... don't let them give you the least Uneasiness; but call to mind what your Friend good Mr. Whitefield once said to me on such an Occasion; "I read the Libels writ against you, says he, when I was in a remote province, where I could not be inform'd of the Truth of the Facts; but they rather gave me this good Opinion of you, that you continued to be USEFUL to the Publick: For when I am on the Road, and see Boys in a Field at a Distance, pelting a tree, though I am too far off to know what Tree it is, I conclude it has FRUIT on it."

Having already defended Franklin before his English critics, Whitefield was more than prepared to support him before Americans. At this time, Whitefield was a far more popular figure in the American eye than Franklin. A word on Franklin's behalf from the eyewitness Whitefield could move mountains of popular distrust and opposition. In a calculated attempt to stem American hostility to Franklin, the Philadelphia patriot Joseph Galloway asked Whitefield for a character reference and testimony, believing that his words would "clear up [Franklin's] reputation to all the American world. For who dare deny Mr. Whitefield's authority - will the Church? Will the Presbyterians?"

Whitefield happily complied with the request and went one step further by enlisting the support of his letter-writing network to spread the word of Franklin's patriotism. Calvinist readers throughout the colonies learned how Franklin "spoke very heartily and judiciously in his country's behalf." Soon the newspapers picked up on Whitefield's praise. By April of 1766, William Franklin wrote his father,

You cannot conceive the Satisfaction which the Accounts of your Examination at the Bar of the House of Commons have afforded your friends. Dr. Fothergill and Mr. Whitefield have mentioned your Behaviour on the Occasions in High Terms. I am told the latter says America owes the Repeal of the Stamp Act to the assiduous Endeavors of ... Dr. Franklin.

On more than one occasion, Franklin had stood by Whitefield in the face of public accusation and libel. Now Whitefield returned the favor.

When not busy with political affairs, Whitefield preached at the Tabernacle and continued working for his college. Further opportunity for him to comment indirectly on American affairs occurred when six methodists were expelled from Oxford for their extemporaneous prayers and background in the "manual trades." Having already been defeated on the issue of a charter for the college, and publicly sympathetic with the colonies, an outraged Whitefield took the offensive and published a pamphlet in the methodists' defense.

The defense was clearly written for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Whitefield skillfully interwove the local issue of dismissed students with broader American fears of an imposed New World Anglican bishop. While Parliament hoped to solidify its jurisdiction over the colonies, wrote Whitefield, the Anglican church hoped to centralize its authority in the New World with an American bishop. This, Whitefield warned, would lead to tyranny. If bishops could expel methodist students in England for nothing more than a dissenter's piety, their overseas missions could clearly not be trusted. An American bishop would be as intolerant as his English counterpart. In fact, Whitefield complained, the overseas mission of the Anglican Church was not a "Society for propagating the Gospel" but a "Society for propagating Episcopacy in foreign parts." He went on to ask, "how must it increase the prejudices of our colonists ... against the establishment of Episcopacy."

Whitefield's letter provoked a wave of bitter opposition from the Church in England. Lying behind the opposition was a sense that Whitefield spoke not only for methodists but also for the "rebellions" of the American colonists. One especially outraged writer recommended that British authorities "make an example of Tabernacle preachers, by enacting a law to cut out their tongues."

At the same time the letter aroused controversy in England, it confirmed old friendships in America. The defense was reprinted in Boston and widely serialized in the press. Americans, no less than the English, saw the double message in the defense. Again, the Anglican-ordained evangelist attacked his own church, this time on grounds as clearly political as religious. Whitefield knew little of colonial law or political theory, but he understood the politics of popular mobilization as well as anyone, and he recognized that if he was to play a role in that drama, it would be around the familiar ecclesiastical issue of an American bishopric rather than the constitutional issues of taxation and representation. "Tyranny" existed throughout English society and must be combated in the English church no less than the English Parliament. Whatever outrages American Anglicans may have felt over this assault were muted. Whitefield held the American imagination, and any criticism of him would be an act of self-destruction. In fact, it was far easier for American loyalists or neutrals to criticize Franklin than to criticize Whitefield.

Although Whitefield could not ignore politics, it would never become all-consuming for him. From first to last, Whitefield remained a preacher and continued his tours of England and Scotland. Following his June 1768 tour of Edinburgh, he rejoiced that "our Orphan House Park assemblies [were] as large and attentive as ever." In Scotland as in America, reports of his preaching increasingly assumed an air of nostalgia. Whitefield himself was visibly moved to see how "twentyseven-year-old friends and spiritual children remember the days of old. They are seeking after their first love, and there seems to be a stirring among the dry bones." Whitefield had grown up in turmoil and confrontation; now he grew old in waves of nostalgia that hid the pressing issues of the age. While on tour, political issues paled before the ongoing revival. No one could tell Whitefield, as long as he preached, that the revivals had passed.

On returning from Edinburgh, Whitefield learned that Elizabeth was gravely ill. On August 9, his long-suffering and silent companion of twenty-seven years died. The loss shook Whitefield but did not deter his life's course. No time was lost to grief. Two days after her burial he wrote a friend, "Let us work whilst it is day." Two weeks later he opened Lady Huntington's college at Trevecca with a sermon and charge to the Methodist students. And from there he prepared to leave for America again.

Whitefield's nonstop preaching after Elizabeth's death had a predictable effect. Overexertion led to a ruptured blood vessel and a period of forced convalescence from September through the new year. In January of 1767 he took Cornelius Winter into his home as aide and secretary. Left without a wife and in ailing health, Whitefield longed to return "home" to America. On March 17 he wrote the orphan-house managers to expect him shortly: "I am every day, every hour, almost every moment, thinking of, and preparing for America. A pilgrim life to me is the sweetest on this side of eternity." Whitefield knew himself better than anyone, and he knew that he needed public targets and public audiences to sustain his life. America was the scene of great actions that fueled his will to live. He would see it for one last stand.

On the eve of his departure, Whitefield received word from Franklin that Parliament had dispatched troops to Boston and warned of the possible outcome. It was, Franklin confided, a "dangerous step.... I cannot but fear the consequences of bringing them together."

Undeterred, Whitefield pressed ahead. On August 30 he preached farewell sermons to the loyal congregations at the Moorfields Tabernacle and Tottenham Court Road Chapel. This was where it had all begun. Observers noted that much of the old verve was gone. Whitefield rambled more than before and evoked the nostalgia of a friend taking leave of friends, perhaps for the last time. An admirer in the audience, Joseph Gourney, recorded both sermons in shorthand. To his loyal followers, Whitefield explained that "this is the thirteenth time of my crossing the mighty waters, it is a little difficult at this time of life ... but I delight in the cause, and God fills me with a peace that is unutterable." The times, Whitefield cautioned, were ominous: "clouds are growing thick" and great "storms" appeared on the horizon. Whitefield's prayer was that "the great and gracious God may avert every impending storm." As for himself, he was visiting America to heal, not to found a movement: "witness against me, if I ever set up a party for myself."

The concluding remarks, taken verbatim by Gourney, capture the pathos of the moment:

I dare not meet you now, I can't bear your coming to me to part from me, it cuts me to the heart and quite overcomes me, but by and by all parting will be over, and all tears shall be wiped away from our eyes.

A seventeen-year-old future itinerant was in the crowd that day and recorded his thoughts: "I remember a thought which passed my mind, I think, as I was going to hear his last sermon, 'which would I rather be, Garrick or Whitefield?' I thought each, in point of oratory, admirable in his way. I doubt not conscience told me which was best."

In September 1769, an ailing Whitefield sailed for his seventh and last visit to America. He had always spoken as if any visit would be his last, but this time the weakness was palpable. Aware of his precarious health, he brought two apprentice companions with him, Cornelius Winter and Richard Smith. Winter had been living with him in London since Elizabeth's death and would remain in Georgia to begin a mission to the slaves. Smith would accompany Whitefield on his northern speaking tour.

Whatever fears Whitefield had for his health did not show. To Winter's eye, he seemed to enjoy the voyage, "familiarizing himself to his naval situation [and] acquainting himself with the crew and passengers." As in the old days, he filled his hours observing the sea and composing sermons and letters for the press. But this time another subject also caught his interest. Tensions between England and her colonies turned his attention to constitutional histories of England and the subject of liberty.

In the past, Whitefield had shown little interest in political history or in the ideological questions that separated England from Scotland or her colonies. External enemies and wars he had cast solely within the context of "popery," anti-Christ, and loyalty to the English crown. All that was changing in the heated aftermath of the Seven Years War and the Stamp Act, as American colonists challenged Parliament's sovereignty and, with that challenge, raised ideological questions of popular rights and constitutional balance to the forefront of AngloAmerican consciousness. British troops were on their way to Boston at the time Whitefield sailed, and Franklin was besieged in the House of Commons. For Whitefield, as for those on all sides, questions of English rule - and English constitutional history -became compelling. Whitefield's considerations brought him down on the side of the colonial patriots.

Late in life, Whitefield now added "real Whig" republican to his enduring identity as a revivalist. His crash course in the history of liberty, though recent and unavoidably superficial, could not have been alien to him. He had spent much of his career seeking to achieve religious rights for methodists using arguments similar to those employed by colonial patriots. And his own embattled relationship to the Church of England closely paralleled the colonies' increasingly strained relationship with Parliament. If Whitefield did not wish to abolish institutions or dispel deference, neither did most of his clerical friends among the patriot leaders. Instead, they sought extrainstitutional means to transcend a traditional order, and they demanded that laws and courts grant them the freedom of speech and assembly that such transcendence required. In plain terms, they demanded a recognition of their "rights" as English citizens and English Christians.

Whitefield's well-known American sympathies simply enhanced his already legendary popularity in the colonies. It was clear that the attraction between Whitefield and his American audiences was more than simply religious or charismatic. In fact, both were brash and experimental voices outside the mainstream that saw in one another the shape of a new religious and political future. If they could not yet articulate that future in theoretical terms, they could and had experienced it in the form of translocal revivals and Stamp Act "congresses." They would leave it to others to catch theory up to practice. Both Whitefield and his beloved Americans were tilting against the past in perfect confidence that the future would sing their praises and perpetuate their legacy.

On November 30 Whitefield's party landed in Charleston and he began preaching immediately. For several days he preached in that city, delighted to discover that his body held up to the demands of weekly sermons. As always, he took it as a sign that he should take on more work - in this case, a return to daily preaching - really the only life he knew. The added efforts would kill him before long, but not before he completed the work at Bethesda and one last tour.

From Charleston, Whitefield was conveyed to Bethesda in the familiar mode of slave-paddled canoe. It had been four years since he had last visited Bethesda, and many then had thought they would never see him again. So the reunion was all the more joyous, both at the orphan house and throughout the Georgia colony. Whitefield stayed there through the winter, preaching weekly and working to establish his college.

The college had become nearly an obsession. The London Tabernacle had always been important to him, but only instrumentally as a place to preach. The college, on the other hand, captivated his soul for reasons he could only dimly see. The pietist in Whitefield forsook any claims to a spiritual prominence that would displace Christ, and the anti-institutional strain in him prevented any identification with one denomination, but the proud performer in him wanted to live beyond the last curtain. Obviously there could be no Christian stage. Nor was the Tabernacle well suited to express the transatlantic, transdenominational shape of Whitefield's genius. It was in Bethesda College that Whitefield identified his longed-for monument. In all regards, it was a fitting symbol. It took in orphans and deserving "servitors" for college training, it trained ministers for service in revivals, it inculcated the methodist lifestyle of devotional simplicity, and, most important, it dwelt in the newest colony of the brave new world Whitefield had come to love. Nothing in the old country had captivated his soul as the new had, and so now in his final years it was the New World college that received his fondest institutional attention.

Having failed to secure a charter from the archbishop, Whitefield concentrated his energies on the Georgia legislature and his own considerable fund-raising capabilities. A surprise legacy from Scotland left Whitefield some discretionary income for the first time in his life, and with this he immediately paid off the remaining orphan house debt and announced that the leftover money would be used to begin construction of additional buildings for the college.

Whitefield preferred that the college not bear his name, but in every other respect, from funding to rules and curriculum, he made sure it would bear the mark of his personal attention and direction. He drew up a series of rules for the college and basic curricular requirements. In it he included daily prayers - both liturgical and extemporaneous - and memorization of the Thirty Nine Articles. To satisfy nonconformists he also recommended readings from such English Puritan worthies as Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Poole, and John Edwards. His own shipboard libertarian reading showed its impact in his requirement that "the history of Georgia, and the constitution of England, [be read] before being taught the history of Greece and Rome." Much of his direction he borrowed from Princeton and conceived out of his own private sense that Bethesda College would be chiefly an engine of evangelization.

Ever mindful of the slaves, Whitefield made careful provision for their welfare. As in the orphan house, slave labor was to sustain the college. In return, the college would provide for "the young negro boys to be baptized and taught to read; the young girls to be taught to work with the needle." By eighteenth-century American standards, such provisions put Whitefield and such fellow evangelical planters as Hugh Bryan and James Habersham at the forefront of enlightened slave ownership. The goal of supplying slaves with literacy skills was novel and dangerous, but it was consistent with Whitefield's lifelong insistence that the slaves had souls - and minds - of their own. He was not afraid to give them everything other students would have - everything but their freedom.

With rules and curriculum set, Whitefield still lacked buildings, students, and tutors. But these, he felt, would come in time. In the interim, he could certainly set the stage. And so, as a preview of coming attractions calculated to impress the Georgia Assembly, he announced a celebration dinner at Bethesda. The governor, council, and assorted dignitaries were invited to welcome their new college.

The honorable party arrived from their ten-mile journey in a train of twenty carriages. Every dignitary in the colony arrived to pay respects to Whitefield and his planned college. In return they were treated to a sumptuous feast perfectly orchestrated in collegial fashion by Whitefield. The newly founded Georgia Gazette described the event in words that were reprinted throughout the colonies. The evening began with a formal procession led by the orphan boys "in flat caps and black gowns, like the servitors in the university." The group processed into the chapel, where the governor and his council slowly mounted the chapel steps and sat in "great chairs" of prominence.

Once assembled, the dignitaries heard Whitefield preach a portentous sermon from Zechariah 7: "And who hath despised the day of small things?" The sermon was both selfpromoting and nostalgic as Whitefield recalled those who had paid their dues in the past to make a stable present and a glorious future for Georgia. Many in his audience could recall the difficult beginnings in the "once despised deserted province of Georgia," where "lands which now sell for three pounds an acre might have been purchased for three shillings." The orphan house mission, together with a handful of merchants, had saved the colony from extinction and laid the basis for an enduring settlement. With continued growth, and now with a college of its own, the colony would assume its rightful place among the crown jewels of the British empire. Whitefield concluded by noting that construction on the college had already begun.

Following the sermon, the party adjourned to feast in the great room. The meal was followed by toasts to the crown. In patriotic New England no such toasts would have been made, but at Bethesda, where much of the assembly remained Loyalist, the gesture was not out of place. In fact, throughout his stay in the South, Whitefield was careful not to express his more extreme patriotic sentiments. As reported in the Georgia Gazette, "when the governor drank the king, Mr. Whitefield added, 'And let all the people say Amen,' which was immediately echoed back with a repeated loud Amen from one end of the room to the other."

All, including Whitefield, left the feast certain that the college would become Georgia's crowning religious and civic achievement. None could foresee how Whitefield's imminent death and the looming war with Great Britain would destroy the charismatic transatlantic foundation on which the college rested. But for that brief moment Bethesda College was a reality in the minds and imaginations of all those present.

With spring came the time for final farewells at the orphan house and for the move north. By the time Whitefield arrived at Philadelphia in early May, political tensions had sharpened again. News of the "Boston Massacre" on March 5, 1770, when five rioting Bostonians were shot by British troops, had raised colonial grievances to a fever pitch. The little resistance to England that Whitefield had noticed in the South grew progressively more radical as he moved north. It was not an easy trip; Whitefield's health prevented any activity other than preaching. But his heart went out to the colonial protesters.

Wherever Whitefield traveled, he got a hero's welcome - and attention. Philadelphians knew of his defense of Franklin and welcomed him as a special guest at the commencement of the Philadelphia Academy begun by Franklin. Whitefield's themes were once again nostalgic. As reported in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, he preached a short sermon praising the colony and its college and then "in particular expressed high Pleasure in beholding a House, [the Long Building] which he had laid the Foundation of thirty years ago, thus continued and improved for the lasting Advancement of Religion and useful knowledge."

In fields and pulpits throughout Pennsylvania, Whitefield attracted large, diverse audiences. Henry Muhlenberg recorded an occasion at the Zion Church on Sunday, May 27, where Whitefield preached before a combined congregation of English and "German people of every religious persuasion." Muhlenberg picked Whitefield up at his lodgings, and "when we reached the church, it was so crowded and closely packed that we had to crowd through the tower door with him and get him in this way." At first Whitefield complained of a cold and hoarseness, but once begun, "he preached quite audibly" and powerfully. In Muhlenberg's observation, he played perfectly to his audience:

He made impressive remarks ... and referred to our Reverend Fathers, the late Mr. Francke and Mr. Ziegenhagen.... He properly deserves to be called Gachswungsrorachs [saw] in the North American tongue, for, in the hands of his Master, he is a sharp saw to cut through the knotty, gnarled, streaky hearts with their countless prejudices, false opinions, excuses, etc., and to scatter sawdust about.... When he concluded his sermon he called upon us to close the service with a German hymn, "Nun ruhen alle Walder," etc. Our parishioners, scattered about upstairs and down, most of them women, sang so charmingly, devoutly, and sublimely that the English people were quite enraptured and are still speaking of it to this day.

As always, women were conspicuous in the crowd. The language of liberty did not extend to them politically, but it did religiously. Women found more central roles in Whitefield's revivals than they would ever be allowed in politics.

By the end of July, Whitefield had traveled a fivehundred-mile circuit throughout the middle colonies. His health had not fully improved, but his spirits were so taken up by the euphoria of preaching that he determined to resume "daily preaching" - a decision that would soon prove fatal. Meanwhile, wherever he preached, he witnessed "revival" and raised additional funds for the orphan house and college. In a letter to his friend at the Tabernacle, Robert Keen, he rejoiced, "0 what a new scene of usefulness is opening in various parts of the new world! All fresh work where I have been. The Divine influence has been as at the first." As always, invitations poured in "from many quarters."

From the middle colonies Whitefield traveled north, hoping to avoid the seasonal heat so that he could continue his daily preaching. There was no letup in his schedule, and the New England itinerary read much like his earlier tours. To many outside observers, the pace seemed suicidal - or at the least irresponsible. In fact, it was entirely consistent with Whitefield's life and message. He had at all times demonstrated a callous disregard for his private self, both body and spirit. The preaching moment engulfed all, and it would continue to do so, for in fact there was nothing else he lived for.

In New England, the public reception was predictably enthusiastic. Not only was Whitefield a self-confessed spiritual heir of New England's Puritan progenitors but he was also a symbol of liberty at a time when Boston was besieged. The newly founded Massachusetts Spy, published by Isaiah Thomas and given over largely to political commentary, carried the happy news that on August 15 "the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield arrived here, in good health, from Providence ... and preached this afternoon to a very crowded audience at the old-North meeting House." Whitefield responded to his embattled New England friends with genuine sympathy. In a letter to Robert Keen he evidenced a far stronger sympathy with the patriot cause than he had ever exhibited in Georgia: "Poor New England is much to be pitied. Boston people most of all. How falsely misrepresented! What a mercy that our Christian charter cannot be dissolved as easily as Parliament threatens to dissolve popular government in America."

Again Whitefield pushed himself relentlessly. Much of his New England travel was rough, done on horseback with frequent stops. Still, he went on, insisting to friends that "I would rather wear out than rust out." He ignored the danger signs, in particular asthmatic "colds" that brought "great difficulty" in breathing. Instead of resting, he rode on, preaching more rather than less, depending on the moment of preaching to bring out a "good pulpit sweat" that would grant him one more day's reprieve. Daily travel and preaching were now joined with frequent "exhortations," marked by almost the same sort of frenzy that had characterized his first tour in 1740. The pace continued even after he was "taken in the night with a violent lax, attended with retching and shivering."

Clearly, Whitefield sensed the imminence of death and was pushing himself beyond prudence. In effect, he was living each day as if it were his last. And this meant that, regardless of health, he must preach and travel each day, so that if - and when - the last day arrived, it would fulfill the character with which he wanted to close out his career: the ever-zealous revivalist whose last breath was spent preaching Christ.

Throughout those days, Whitefield did not appear depressed or suicidal. Indeed, he evidenced a spiritual fervor and ideological solidarity with the colonists suggesting that he was acutely alive and engaged with all that was going on around him. As long as he could, he would preach gladly and with exuberance, for he knew that when he lost that freedom, he would have nothing to fill the void. The private man and the family man had long since ceased to exist. In the final scene, there was only Whitefield in his pulpit.

Whatever fears Whitefield may have harbored concerning death he never articulated. Descriptions of deathbed scenes were a commonplace in Protestant piety, and Whitefield evidently intended to play the role fully. He had already composed a hymn for his funeral entitled Ah! Lovely Appearance of Death and had spoken freely of his eagerness to be taken up in heaven. Now, with the end approaching, he supplied his public with a script worthy of his name. Just as he had always found in the pulpit the courage to confront life, so also would he find in the pulpit the arena where he could challenge death itself with complete composure.

A complete account of Whitefield's last days and his last act appears in newspaper reports and personal memoirs. Inevitably, these accounts read like the final scene in a play. They tell how Whitefield rejected the doctors' advice and returned to daily preaching. They describe all his stops at familiar places and the joy he frequently expressed traveling in his "pilgrim mode." They portray not a depressed Whitefield but a preacher-actor seizing the last moment in the limelight and giving the show of his life.

On Saturday morning, September 29, Whitefield concluded another successful sermon at Portsmouth, Massachusetts, and immediately set out for the next stop at Newburyport. Eyewitnesses described him, nearly collapsed, being helped onto his horse and then plodding on despite the entreaties of concerned friends and admirers. At a mid-day stop in Exeter, Whitefield was enjoined to preach, and he complied. One friend, on observing the "oppressive heavings of his bosom," counseled, "Sir, you are more fit to go to bed than to preach." Whitefield ignored the warning and answered with a prayer: "Lord, if I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the fields, seal thy truth, and come home and die!"

Whitefield's prayer was answered. His last discourse took place mid-afternoon in the fields, atop a hogshead. His text was "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in faith," and his subject was the great Puritan theme of faith versus works. A listener in the fields recounted the event for the press,

He rose up sluggishly and wearily, as if worn down and exhausted by his stupendous labours. His face seemed bloated, his voice was hoarse, his enunciation heavy. Sentence after sentence was thrown off in rough, disjointed portions, without much regard to point or beauty. [But then] his mind kindled, and his lion-like voice roared to the extremities of his audience. He was speaking of the inefficiency of works to merit salvation, and suddenly cried out in a tone of thunder, "Works! Works! a man get to heaven by works! I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand."

The eyewitness account was widely printed in the press and in subsequent collections of sermons and memoirs. Another account recorded Whitefield's closing words on departing Essex as follows: "I soon shall be in a world where time, age, pain, and sorrow are unknown. My body fails, my spirit expands. How willingly would I live for ever to preach Christ! But I die to be with Him."

Following the sermon, according to the stories, an exhausted Whitefield insisted on continuing his journey, once more against the advice of friends. His destination was the home of his old Presbyterian friend Jonathan Parsons, who had defended him so vigorously in the early years. It was also home of the "Old South" Presbyterian Church. Earlier, he had expressed a wish to be buried before Old South's pulpit if he died in America.

Upon arriving at Parsons's house, he was too ill to dine and announced his intention to go to bed. But again a crowd of admirers waited on him, and eventually received a "brief exhortation."

The exhortation would be Whitefield's final public words. According to Richard Smith's account, he retired to his quarters immediately thereafter, complaining of difficulty in breathing. At 5:00 A.M. a worried Smith called for Parsons to come to their quarters immediately. By then, Whitefield was running from window to window in desperate attempts to breathe, worrying all the time he would be unable to preach the next day.

Parsons ran to the room and, recognizing the gravity of the situation, immediately called for a physician. But the cause was lost. According to Smith's account,

When the doctor came in, and saw him in the chair leaning on my breast, he felt his pulse, and said "He is a dead man." Mr. Parsons said, "I do not believe it, you must do something, doctor." He said, "I cannot; he is now near his last breath." And indeed, so it was, for he fetched but one gasp, and stretched out his feet, and breathed no more. This was exactly at six o'clock. We continued rubbing his legs and hands and feet with warm cloths, and bathed him with spirits for some time, but all in vain. I then put him into a warm bed, the doctor standing by, and often raised him upright, continued rubbing him, and putting spirits to his nose for an hour, till all hopes were gone.

When news of Whitefield's death reached Boston, a party of ministers and friends set out immediately for Newburyport to claim the body so that he might be buried in Boston. As his life began in gospel analogies to Bethlehem, so would it end in a bizarre rendition of the opened sepulcher. The clergy were met by Parsons and told in no uncertain terms that Whitefield would be buried in the Presbyterian church, in a "Brick Tomb under the Presbyterian Meeting-House." In a sense, this last unpleasantness was fitting: for one who had made controversy a foundation of his career, a little controversy at the end represented the perfect capstone.

On Tuesday, September 31, a number of ministers gathered at the Rev. Parsons's manse and led an extraordinary procession to the burial site. The pallbearers were ecumenical in makeup and included the Presbyterian Parsons, the Anglican Edward Bass, and Congregationalists Samuel Haven, Daniel Rogers, Jedediah Jewett, and James Chandler.

The funeral procession extended over a mile in length as it made its way to the meetinghouse. Nothing in Newburyport annals had ever matched such an assembly. Six thousand mourners packed the church, and thousands more lined the street grieving. The bells of the town were tolled, and guns were fired from the harbor.

A mahogany-stained casket costing £8 was built for Whitefield, and he "was buried in gown, cassock, bands and wig." His corpse was placed at the foot of the pulpit. The Rev. Daniel Rogers offered the prayer. It was to Whitefield's ministry in the early years, Rogers confessed, that he owed his own conversion. The memory of this so gripped him that he broke off the prayer in tears, exclaiming "0 my Father! my Father!"

Following the prayer, the coffin was placed in a newly prepared tomb beneath the pulpit. Before the tomb was sealed, the Rev. Jedediah Jewett delivered a brief address, mixing pathos with politics. After describing Whitefield's ministry, Jewett went on to exclaim, "what a friend he has been to us, and our interests, religious and civil; to New England, and to all the British colonies in the Continent!" As the body was placed in the tomb, another prayer was offered, and then the "immense crowd departed, weeping through the streets, as in mournful groups they wended their way to their respective homes."

If Whitefield could not have been more dramatic in the hour of his death, neither could his admirers have been more impassioned. His death provoked widespread displays of tears and sorrow without precedent in the American colonies. Not until the death of George Washington would there be a more universal display of sadness and loss.

Such was Whitefield's public reputation that people having no personal acquaintance with him interrupted their journals to enter the historic death. In Brookfield, Massachusetts, the Old Light pastor Nathan Fiske made an extraordinary entry in his manuscript diary: "Last evening we were informed by a melancholy Messenger from Newbury-Port that yesterday morning Whitefield had died." Fiske was not given to tributes in his diary, let alone tributes to New Lights, but this occasion was different. It called for a personal statement. And so, appended to the usual one-line entries was the following assessment:

In his public Performances throughout Europe and ... in most parts of British America ... [Whitefield] has for a long number of years astonished the world as a Prodigy of Eloquence and Devotion.... With what divine Pathos did he not plead with the impenitent Sinners to the Practice of Virtue and Piety.

Fiske's entry is revealing not only for the way in which it registers the impact of Whitefield's death but also for the nature of the remembrance. Already a mythologization of sorts was taking place. As in all myths, Whitefield was invoked for qualities that expressed the ethos of the speaker. In Fiske's case, what was remembered was neither Whitefield's piety nor his Calvinism but his "Eloquence," and "Practice of Virtue."

American friends of the revival remembered Whitefield's "Puritan" character. At the Thursday Lecture in Boston on October 11, Whitefield's staunch ally Ebenezer Pemberton delivered the eulogy. He remembered especially how Whitefield preached "those great Doctrines of the Gospel which our venerable Ancestors brought with them from their Native Country." In so doing, he engrafted Whitefield into the American Puritan mythology. American "typologists" were long in the habit of paralleling their experiences and leaders to ancient Israel and the New Testament church. Now Whitefield was joining that American typology. In Philadelphia, the Presbyterian James Sproutt spoke for all when he noted that Whitefield's preaching produced "probably more [conversions] than any one man since the Apostolic age." In fact, he implied, Whitefield was an American Paul.

As memorable as Whitefield's evangelicalism was his character. In eulogizing Whitefield, Pemberton turned from the itinerant's evangelical successes to his charity and generosity: "with large opportunities of accumulating wealth, he never discovered the least Tincture of Avarice.... His benevolent Mind was perpetually forming Plans of extensive Usefulness." Instead of private wealth, the orphan house and college would be "lasting monuments of his Care, that Religion and Learning might be propagated to future Generations."

Perhaps most remarkable in the accounts of Whitefield's death, however, was the sense of personal loss expressed by many who never knew him personally. Everywhere people were devastated by the news. In ways befitting the unique relationship of Whitefield and his admirers, the mourners became as much a part of the news as Whitefield himself. As word of his death spread, the drama heightened with an evergrowing number of mourners. In every colony and urban center, a public service and eulogy honored his passing. And at every stop, the press carried news of the audience as well as the occasion. The audience, after all, had made Whitefield as much as he had made them.

The greatest public mourning took place in Georgia. Cornelius Winter was preaching to the orphan house slaves when word came from James Habersham of Whitefield's death. "As soon as I heard it," Winter recalled, "I retreated to pray, and pour out my soul to God. I can truly say, the cause of God at large lay near my heart, and I had a persuasion that the work over which he had presided would not die with him." In a subsequent letter, Winter went on to describe the scene of mourning in Georgia:

You have no conception of the effect of Mr. Whitefield's death upon the inhabitants of the province of Georgia. All the black cloth in the stores was bought up; the pulpit and desks of the church, the branches, the organ loft, the pews of the governor and council, were covered with black. The governor and council, in deep mourning, convened at the state-house, and went in procession to church, and were received by the organ playing a funeral dirge. Two funeral sermons were preached, one by Mr. Ellington, which I was desired to compose; the other was preached by Mr. Zubly. All the respect showed to his memory at his death, kept my sensibility alive.

Whitefield's death left Winter "set up doing the best I could for the poor negroes.... I had settled it in my own mind in submission to the will of God, that I would, being put into a capacity of usefulness, live and die in Georgia, a devoted servant of servants."

In fact, Winter would not be allowed to remain in Georgia. Despite the efforts of Habersham in Georgia and Franklin in England, the cause came to naught. Though this could have been Whitefield's greatest legacy, it was not. But his concern for the slaves and their connection to Whitefield was clear, and so it is not surprising that perhaps the greatest mourning was expressed among the slave community. A seventeen-year-old black Boston servant and self-trained poet named Phyllis Wheatley expressed her sense of loss in a widely printed elegy that registered the emotion of the black community:

Questions of the correlation between conversions and changed lives in Whitefield's revivals can be debated, but in the case of the slaves, the changes were indisputable. More than any other eighteenth-century figure, Whitefield established Christian faith in the slave community. His support of slavery remains a blot on his memory that has deprived him of heroic status in African-American history. But in 1770, while many Americans continued to doubt that slaves had souls, Whitefield stood as the slaves' greatest champion, and at the time he was mourned as such.

Throughout the colonies, newspapers suspended political commentary to eulogize Whitefield. The press and Whitefield had grown up together in the colonies, one as hero and the other as hero-maker. Never was there a better fit. In Boston, the Massachusetts Spy took space away from the Boston Massacre to praise Whitefield in mythic terms as revivalist and patriot. Appropriately, it went on to reprint an elegiac essay composed by "a Female reader." In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Chronicle reported Sproutt's sermon noting "the Presbyterian Church in Arch Street was hung in black, in Testimony of their Regard for the late Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, when five Hymns one of which was composed by Mr. Whitefield himself, for his funeral, were sung." That hymn, noted the Boston Evening Post, expressed the man: "He seem'd to have a clear view of the entertainments of another life; and would commonly converse so familiarly of death, as tho' he was a fine friend he was waiting for, and even long'd to receive the summons."

In New York, the New York Gazette described the "melancholy occasion" of Whitefield's memorial service, echoing the theme of his "fervency of zeal, perhaps unequalled since the Days of the Apostles." In Providence, the Providence Gazette reported services at St. Paul's, where the Rev. William Stringer set forth the "shining qualities of the deceased." And the Gazette contributed yet another elegiac poem, this in the form of an acrostic, the first letters of each line spelling GEORGE WHITEFIELD.

Friends in England and Scotland were as saddened as their American counterparts. Of all the eulogies, the only one Whitefield expressly requested took place in London at his two home pulpits: Moorfields Tabernacle and Tottenham Court Road Chapel. There, on Sunday, November 18, his old friend and sometime rival John Wesley delivered the funeral sermon at morning and afternoon services. The two had been reconciled during Whitefield's last stay in England and had found a common footing in their shared Oxford experience of the New Birth. In death, it suddenly became clear to Wesley why these rivals had been rejoined, and the olive branch went to Whitefield. Of all Whitefield's qualities, Wesley recognized, the most striking was that he was a good and loyal friend. His "servant to all" credo did not stop short of friends. "I have frequently thought," Wesley exclaimed, "that this, of all others, was the distinguishing part of his Character. How few have we known of so kind a temper, of such large and flowing affections? Was it not principally by this, that the hearts of others were so strangely drawn and knit to him?"

John Gillies memorialized Whitefield in terms similar to Wesley's. Both knew him well and recognized the man beneath the talent. Whitefield's "strong and musical voice," "lively imagination," and dramatic style were all important, but none accounted for the full measure of the man. Most significant, Gillies concluded, was a capacity for friendship to all that invariably transcended doctrine and turned on charity: "he had a heart deeply exercised in all the social as well as the pious and religious affections."

In England, word reached Benjamin Franklin of his friend's death. His wife wrote, "Yisterday came the a Counte of the Death of our verey kind Friend Mr. WhiteFeld. It hurte me indeaid. You will see all a bought him in the Papers." To his sister Jane Mecom, Franklin wrote, "I condole you on the Death of my dear old Friend Mr. Whitefield which I have just heart of." Later, in a letter to the Georgia Assembly, he paid tribute to his old friend: "I knew him intimately upwards of thirty years. His Integrity, Disinterestedness, and indefatigable Zeal in prosecuting every good Work, I have never seen equalled, and I shall never see exceeded."

All of these eulogies illustrate the man behind the movement. The public self was the private self, and it was a self "charismatic" in both the ancient and modern senses of the term. If Whitefield was a modern promoter with a shameless ego, he was also a spirit-filled, caring minister who directed his work first at the soul and second at charity, and never one without the other.

For one brief moment, religion again claimed center stage in American public assembly. Whether or not his mourners realized it, Whitefield's passing coincided with the passing of an era. Americans were doubly crushed. They had lost not only a beloved evangelist but an English Anglican who had openly sympathized with their plight and championed their cause. As in Whitefield's life, so in his death, timing was everything. Whatever reservations he may have harbored concerning colonial resistance were never known. He died a Pauline evangelist and an American patriot.

For all of the references to George Whitefield and the "Great Awakening" in the historical literature, there has been a surprising lack of scholarly biographies. However, significant Whitefield materials may be found in more general histories of eighteenth-century revivals and in the periodical literature. Joseph Tracy's nineteenth-century work The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston, 1841) is still unexcelled for its breadth of coverage. Also useful are the following: Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York, 1957); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, 1966); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986); C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800 (New Haven, 1962); Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York, 1991); and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989). Two superb documentary histories of Whitefield and the Great Awakening are The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, ed. Richard L. Bushman (New York, 1969); and The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, ed. Perry Miller and Alan Heimert (Indianapolis, 1967).

Among the substantial number of filiopietistic biographies and appreciations of Whitefield produced by Calvinist and Methodist admirers of Whitefield, three have proved indispensable to this work as repositories of biographical and anecdotal information: Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, 2 vols. (London, 1876); Stuart Henry, George Whitefield: Wayfaring Witness (Nashville, 1957); and Arnold A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, 2 vols. (Westchester, Ill., 1970, 1979).

Among the more important periodical essays on Whitefield and the Great Awakening are: William H. Kenney, "George Whitefield, Dissenter Priest of the Great Awakening," William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 75-93; Jon Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Historical Fiction," Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305-25; Susan O'Brien, "A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735- 1755," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 811-32; Timothy L. Smith, "George Whitefield and the Wesleyan Witness," in Whitefield and Wesley on the New Birth, ed. Timothy L. Smith (Grand Rapids, 1986); Eugene E. White, "The Decline of the Great Awakening in New England, 1741-1746," New England Quarterly 24 (1961): 35-52; S. Durden, "A Study of the First Evangelical Magazines, 1740-1748," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 255-78; and S. J. Royal, "Religious Periodicals in England during the Restoration and Eighteenth Century," Journal of Rutgers University 35 (1971): 27-33. A superb article by Frank Lambert - "George Whitefield and the Great Awaken ing," Journal of American History 77 (1990): 812-37 - appeared after the completion of this biography but reaches many of the same conclusions.

To situate Whitefield in his times, I have relied on a variety of primary sources representing him and his contemporaries. Apart from a handful of autographs preserved in scattered archives, virtually all of Whitefield's manuscript sources have been lost or destroyed. Nevertheless, there is a substantial body of printed materials that serve the biographer well. Still unsurpassed as a single-source respository for Whitefield's sermons, letters, and pamphlets is The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, 6 vols., ed. John Gillies (London, 1771-72).

Other important collections of Whitefield's writings can be grouped in four major categories: journals, letters, newspaper accounts, and printed sermons. The most convenient reprinting of Whitefield's journals is George Whitefield's Journals (London, 1960), a compilation of all seven published journals from 1738 through 1741, together with an unpublished journal of 1744-45. Besides the Whitefield correspondence reprinted in the Gillies edition of Whitefield's Works, the other major collection of Whitefield's correspondence is reprinted in "Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield, 1745-46," ed. John W. Christie, Journal of the Department of History of the Presbyterian Historical Society 32 (1954), nos. 2, 3, and 4.

Of the vast body of published Whitefield correspondence, the following appear in this biography: Whitefield, A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1739); Whitefield, Letter from the Rev. George Whitefield to the Rev. John Wesley (London, 1740); Whitefield, Letter from George Whitefield to John Wesley on Universal Redemption (Boston, 1814); Whitefield, A Letter to Harvard College (Boston, 1745); Whitefield, A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Durell (London, 1768); Whitefield, An Expostulatory Letter Addressed to Count Zinzendorff (London, 1753); John Green, The Principles and Practices of the Methodists ... in a Letter to the Rev. George Whitefield (Cambridge, 1761); Whitefield, A Letter to the Religious Societies (London, 1740); Charles Chauncy, A Letter to George Whitefield (Boston, 1745); Whitefield, Three Letters from the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (Philadelphia, 1740); Alexander Garden, Six Letters to the Rev. George Whitefield (Boston, 1740); Whitefield, A Continuation of the Account of the Orphan-House in Georgia (London, 1743); Whitefield, A Letter from the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield to the Religious Societies of England (Edinburgh, 1742); Whitefield, "Letter to Benjamin Coleman," dated 4 July 1740 and pasted inside the cover of a copy of Benjamin Dorr's History of Christ Church in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1881) in Huntington Library; "Jonathan Edwards's Letter of Invitation to George Whitefield," ed. Henry Abelove, William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 487-89; Thomas Church, A Serious and Expostulatory Letter to the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (London, 1744); and Benjamin Franklin, "Dr. Franklin to George Whitefield," dated 15 June 1753, in mss. collections of Huntington Library.

A surprisingly neglected Whitefield source has been the eighteenth-century press. Among the religious newspapers and histories consulted for this biography, the most useful were Thomas Prince Jr.'s Christian History (Boston), Weekly Miscellany (London), The Weekly History (London), Scots Magazine, Glasgow Weekly History, and the Christian Monthly History (Edinburgh);

In the secular press, significant Whitefield materials were located in the following newspapers: Pennsylvania Gazette, American Weekly Mercury, Pennsylvania Journal, Boston NewsLetter, Boston Post-Boy, Boston Evening Post, Boston Gazette, New England Weekly Journal, South-Carolina Gazette, Georgia Gazette, and the Providence Gazette.

Despite Whitefield's reputation as an extemporaneous preacher, collections of his printed sermons abound. In addition to the sermons preserved in Whitefield's Works, I have drawn from the following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections: Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield, ed. John Gillies (London, 1772); Whitefield, Sermons on Various Important Subjects by the Rev. George Whitefield, A.M. (Boston, 1741); Whitefield, A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations Occasioned by the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (Boston, 1756); Whitefield, Nine Sermons (London, 1750); Whitefield, Fifteen Sermons (New York, 1794); Whitefield, Sermons on Various Important Subjects (London, 1739); Whitefield, Britain's Mercies and Britain's Duties (Philadelphia, 1746); and Eighteen Sermons Taken in Shorthand, ed. Joseph Gurney (New York, 1809).

Among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources quoted in this biography, the most important are the following: William Seward, Journal of a Voyage from Savannah to Philadelphia (London, 1740); William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge (London, 1633); John Bulwer, Pathomyotamia; or, A Dissection of the Signifative Muscles of the Affections of the Minde (London, 1649); John Bulwer, Chirologia, Chironomia; or, The Art of Manuall Rhetorique ... Touching the Artificiall Managing of the Hand in Speaking (London, 1644); John Hill, The Actor; or, Guide to the Stage (New York, 1823); Samuel Foote, The Minor: A Comedy (New York, 1813); James Lockington, Memoirs of James Lockington (Newburgh, 1796); The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia, 1942-58); The Journal of Charles Wesley, 2 vols., ed. Thomas Jackson (London, 1849); "The Spiritual Travails of Nathan Cole," ed. Michael J. Crawford, William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 89-126; James Habersham, "The Letters of Hon. James Habaersham 1756-1775," in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, vol. 6 (Savannah, 1904); The Journal of William Stephens, 1741-1745, ed. E. Merton Coulter (Athens, Ga., 1958); Nathan Fiske, "Diary," Manuscripts Collection, American Antiquarian Society; Memoirs of the Late Reverend Cornelius Winter, ed. William Jay (Bath, 1808); Ann Hester Rogers, An Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (New York, 1828); John Wesley, Thoughts on Marriage and a Single Life (Bristol, 1743); Alexander Garden, Regeneration and the Testimony of the Spirit (Charleston, 1740); Benjamin Colman, A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Williams (Boston, 1744); and Diary of Rev. Daniel Wadsworth, 1734-1747, ed. G. L. Walker (Hartford, 1894).

The Cambuslang conversion narratives cited in this biography are located in the manuscript archives of New College Library, University of Edinburgh. Contemporary accounts of Whitefield in Scotland include the following: The Life and Diary of the Rev. Ralph Erskine of Dunfermline, ed. Donald Fraser (Edinburgh, 1834); John Maclaurin, Sermons and Essays (Edinburgh, 1772); Henry M. Wellwood, Account of the Life and Writings of John Erskine (Edinburgh, 1818); James Robe, A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God at Kilsyth (Glasgow, 1742); Alexander Webster, Divine Influence: The True Spring of the Extraordinary Work at Cambuslang (Edinburgh, 1742); An Apology for the Presbyterians of Scotland Who Are Hearers of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (Edinburgh, 1742); John Erskine, The Signs of the Times Considered; or, The High Probability, That the Present Appearances in New-England, and the West of Scotland, Are a Prelude of the Glorious Things Promised to the Church in the Latter Ages (Edinburgh, 1742); and John Erskine, A Fair and Impartial Account of the Debate in the Synod of Glasgow and Air Sixth Oct 1748 anent Employing Mr. Whitefield (Edinburgh, 1748).

The "paper war" of 1745 fought by Whitefield's supporters and detractors in New England generated an unrivaled body of polemical literture. I have consulted the following: Thomas Foxcroft, An Apology in Behalf of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (Boston, 1745); William Hobby, An Inquiry into the Itinerancy of George Whitefield (Boston, 1745); William Shurtleff, A Letter to Those of His Brethren (Boston, 1745); Aaron Cleveland, A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Foxcroft (Boston, 1745); Daniel Wadsworth, Testimony of the North Association in Hartford (Boston, 1745); Theophilus Pickering, Letter to Mr. Whitefield (Boston, 1745); The Declaration of the Association of New Haven (Boston, 1745); John Cleaveland, A Twig of Birch for Billy's Breach (Boston, 1745); Nathaniel Eells, A Letter to the Second Church in Scituate (Boston, 1745); JF, A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Hobby (Boston, 1745); Samuel Niles, Tristiae Ecclesiaruin (Boston, 1745); A Letter from the Rev. Mr. Thomas Clap Rector of Yale College (Boston, 1745); Nathanael Henchman, Reasons Offered ... for Declining to Admit Mr. Whitefield (Boston, 1745).

Among the many funeral sermons delivered on the occa sion of Whitefield's death, I have quoted from the following: John Wesley, A Sermon on the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (London, 1770); Ebenezer Pemberton, Heaven the Residence of the Saints (London, 1771); Jonathan Parsons, To Live Is Christ, to Die Is Gain (Portsmouth, 1770); James Sproutt, Funeral Discourse on the Death of the Rev. George Whitefield, A.M. (Philadelphia, 1771); Henry Venn, A Token of Respect to the Memory of the Rev. George Whitefield, A.M. (London, 1770); and Phyllis Wheatley, An Elegiac Poem on the Death of George Whitefield (Boston, 1771).

The body of secondary literature on eighteenth-century religion and society is immense, and I can list only the most essential sources for this biography. For recent works dealing with the impact of an incipient "commercial revolution" on eighteenth-century society, I have been especially enlightened by the recent work of T. H. Breen, especially: "'Baubles of Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 119 (1988); and "An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776," Journal of British Studies 25 (1986). Also suggestive are "Toward a History of the Standard of Living in British North America," William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 116-70; Christine L. Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (New York, 1984); The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington, 1982); Roy Porter, "The Language of Quackery in England, 1660-1800," in The Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1987), 73-103; and R. Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame, 1979).

One recent study of theater and a consumer society that has been especially enlightening is Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). Other major works on theater, religion, and society used for this study in elude the following: Edmund S. Morgan, "Puritan Hostility to the Theatre," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966): 329-47; Jonas Banish, TheAnti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981); M. C. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player (Cambridge, 1962); Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theatre (Princeton, 1944); Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study in the Theatre and in Social Life (New York, 1972); Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1928); and Harry W. Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (New York, 1954).

On Whitefield and Methodism, see Douglas Macleane, A History of Pembroke College Oxford (Oxford, 1897); Two Calvinist Methodist Chapels, 1743-1811, ed. Edwin Welch (London, 1975); J. D. Walsh, "Methodism and the Mob in the Eighteenth Century," in Popular Belief and Practice, ed. G. J. Cumming and D. Baker (London, 1972), pp. 213-37; and Mary Tucker, Itinerant Preaching in the Early Days of Methodism (Boston, 1872).

On Whitefield in England and the British Isles, I have relied on the following: George H. Wicks, Whitefield's Legacy to Bristol and the Cotswolds (Bristol, 1914); Hugh J. Hughes, Life of Howell Harris the Welsh Reformer (London, 1892); Edward Morgan, The Life and Times of Howell Harris, Esq. (Holywell, 1852); Andrew Drummond and James Bulloch, The Scottish Church, 1688-1843: The Age of Moderates (Edinburgh, 1973); Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (New York, 1988); Andrew Hook, Scotland and America, 1750- 1835 (Glasgow, 1975); and Arthur Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1971).

A substantial but already dated bibliographic guide to women and Methodism in the age of Whitefield is Kenneth E. Rowe's Methodist Women: A Guide to the Literature (North Carolina, 1980). A particularly enlightening analysis of women and English Methodism is Deborah Valenze's Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, 1985). 1 have also consulted the following: Frank Baker, "John Wesley and Sarah Crosby," Wesley Historical Society Proceedings 27 (1940): 76-82; Aaron Seymour, The Life and Times of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (London, 1840); and Earl K. Brown, Women of Mr. Wesley's Methodism (New York, 1983).

On Whitefield's relationship with Benjamin Franklin, the primary Franklin sources include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York, 1986); and The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959-). Two suggestive studies of Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin are John Williams, "The Strange Case of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Whitefield," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102 (1978): 399-421; and David T. Morgan, "A Most Unlikely Friendship: Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield," The Historian 47 (1985): 208-18.

On Whitefield and slavery, see the following: Harvey H. Jackson, "Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986): 594-614; Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia (Athens, 1984); William B. Stevens, A History of Georgia (New York, 1847); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Stephen Stein, "George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence," Church History 42 (1973): 243-56; and Alan Gallay, "Jonathan Bryan's Plantation Empire: Land, Politics, and the Formation of a Ruling Class in Colonial Georgia," William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 253-79.

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